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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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