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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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