With her second foray into alternative historical romance (The Virgin Queen’s Daughter, 2008), Chase explores another...
Amid the turmoil of the final days of King Edward’s reign, who will succeed to the throne? His Catholic half sister Mary, his Protestant half sister Elizabeth or perhaps someone else with a little Tudor blood running through her veins?
With her second foray into alternative historical romance (The Virgin Queen’s Daughter, 2008), Chase explores another intriguing mystery: How did Lady Jane Grey and her two sisters react to the political machinations that imprisoned them? Chase sets the fates of Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey against a field of political and personal ambitions. The Duke and Duchess of Suffolk scheme to maneuver their daughters into politically advantageous positions in the hopes of drawing nearer to the throne. With conspirators Northumberland and Pembroke, they marry scholarly Jane to Guilford Dudley, Northumberland’s son, positioning her as a direct threat to Queen Mary. They marry beautiful Katherine to Henry Herbert, Pembroke’s son. They set Mary, with her twisted spine and unsightly face, as decoy, unwittingly reassuring Mary of the Suffolk family’s love despite their treachery. Edward soon dies, Jane is set up as queen for nine days, and Mary escapes the conspirators’ clutches to snare the throne for herself. Thus, the three wagered maids begin to tumble to ruin. The political machinations could easily overwhelm the novel, but Chase keeps the narrative reins firmly in the Grey sisters’ hands. She allows the Grey sisters to tell the story using a kind of snapshot technique, letting each woman tell different parts of it. Jane tells the harrowing details of being forced to wed a man she does not love, to wear a crown she does not want, and to accept beheading for the treason she did not intend. In turn, Kat tells the tale of betrayal, as she is married and set aside, and trust, as she secretly marries for love. Mary tells the tale of the forgotten sister who, too, finds love by putting aside social expectations.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-58898-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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