Fremantle presents an inventive, finely detailed, if lengthy, story.
In her second novel set in 16th-century Tudor England, Fremantle (Queen’s Gambit, 2013) imagines the lives of three historically obscure women: Katherine and Mary Grey, who have claims to the throne, and Levina Teerlinc, the court painter who looks out for them.
Living a tenuous life at court following their elder sister Jane’s brief reign as queen and her subsequent imprisonment and execution, Katherine and Mary know that one misstep could lead them to a similar fate. After all, Tudor blood courses through their veins, and Queen Mary uses public executions to ensure her rule and her goals, including the reinstatement of Catholicism. The current sovereign suffers through several false pregnancies, but she fails to ensure a line of succession by producing a male heir—a matter that concerns the girls’ mother, Frances, as well as her friend Levina. Katherine is beautiful, flirtatious and compulsive. Mary is less worrisome. Uncomfortable with her tiny stature and physical imperfections, most people ignore her, but Queen Mary sometimes treats her as she would a pet or a doll. When Elizabeth I ascends to the throne, Frances is relieved. She hopes the new queen will be more tolerant toward her family and retreats to her country estate. Levina does her best to fulfill her promise to look after Katherine and Mary at court, as first one sister and then the other follows her heart without Elizabeth’s approval and pays the price. Told in alternating sections, the siblings describe their lives and the religious upheaval, political intrigue (including an attempt to wed Katherine to the Spanish court following Queen Mary’s death) and societal attitudes that influence their actions; but it’s Levina’s presence that binds the narrative. For those unfamiliar with this era in British history, the final pages include a brief explanation of the Tudor succession, a cast of characters and suggestions for further reading.
Fremantle presents an inventive, finely detailed, if lengthy, story.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0309-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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