Despite a slow start, Wilhide creates a closely detailed, finely shaded portrayal of love and war that is anti-romantic but...
Attempting to mix the historical tenor of television’s Foyle’s War with the darkly romantic yearnings of Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, Wilhide (Ashenden, 2013) follows the travails of an upper-middle-class British housewife whose comfortable life is shattered by the combination of World War II and her adulterous affair.
Despite the growing likelihood of war, in the summer of 1939 Julia Compton lives in relative contentment with her handsome solicitor husband, Richard, and beloved 9-year-old son, Peter, from whom she maintains a reserved distance while dreading his imminent return to boarding school. Thanks to a trusty housekeeper, Julia has few responsibilities and spends her days shopping, visiting her widowed friend Fiona, and playing the piano. Then a film crew arrives in the Comptons’ small coastal town to film a documentary on fishing. When Julia meets the director, Dougie Birdsall, who puts her in the film, she immediately feels a connection: “New and jolting. Both at the same time.” Passion overrides her sense of propriety and most of her sense of responsibility as she and Dougie carry on an intense affair that is both physical attraction and “a meeting of minds.” Inevitably, Richard finds out and kicks her out. Dougie is also married, but his wife (inured to his philandering tendencies) is conveniently spending the war, which has formally broken out, in Canada with their daughters. Julia moves into his London flat and more bohemian lifestyle. While the follow-the-dots romantic melodrama of the initial affair grows wearisome, the novel’s energy picks up once Julia’s in London. As her relationship with Dougie begins to sour and the trials of war intensify, she slowly learns to stand on her own and to understand what matters most in life. As an aside, the rendering of Peter’s reaction to his belated discovery of his parents’ split is particularly heart-wrenching.
Despite a slow start, Wilhide creates a closely detailed, finely shaded portrayal of love and war that is anti-romantic but far from cynical.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-14-313043-7
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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
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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