Light historical romance with the benefit of a sterling pedigree.
For Jane Austen lovers, this latest take on the Darcy clan offers an amusing addition to the literature of Regency London’s mores.
Aston’s previous Darcy novels (The Exploits and Adventures of Miss Alathea Darcy, not reviewed, etc.) concern the former Miss Bennett and Mr. Darcy’s five daughters—this story takes on the exploits of a few cousins. At 19, Cassandra Darcy is in possession of rare beauty, a fine fortune and a very un-ladylike talent for painting. And though she has all she could ask for, she is under the thumb of her pious stepfather, Mr. Partington. Cassandra’s future is thrown into doubt, though, when Henry Lisser, a German landscape painter brought in to paint the family estate, begins a flirtation with naughty cousin Belle. Everyone believes it was Cassandra kissing Lisser behind the bushes, and to save Belle’s already shaky reputation, Cassandra agrees to go to Bath to reflect on her wickedness. While there, she falls in love with James Eyre, and the two run away to London. But when James halts the marriage plans to negotiate a rich dowry (and too late, passionate Cassandra has already slept with him!), she spurns James, and in turn becomes a social pariah. Enter dashing cousin Horatio Darcy, a lawyer representing her stepfather, to offer Cassandra two choices: Repair to the country and live a life of spinsterhood with the vile Mrs. Harris, or become destitute. Cassandra chooses to make her way in London as a portraitist, but during her first day of freedom makes a monumental error in judgment—she takes rooms with a procuress who intends to turn Cassandra into Lord Usborne’s mistress. Cassandra escapes life in the demimonde with the help of her cousin Camilla, who, with the help of kind Mr. Lisser, sets Cassandra up with her own painting studio. Austenites may balk at this racy, wholly 21st-century reinvention of Austen (Lord Frederick has an eye for men, our teen heroine is no virgin and Aston’s feminist motifs are a bit heavy handed), but all in all, much enjoyment can be had from Cassandra’s attempts to find love and artistic happiness.
Light historical romance with the benefit of a sterling pedigree.Pub Date: March 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-7490-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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