by F.G. Haghenbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 2012
Despite the repetitiousness and pretentious hyperbola that drags on this novel, Kahlo remains a rich character and...
Magical realism and recipes combine in this fictional biography of the iconic Mexican painter.
Actual notebooks discovered after Kahlo’s death have never been published. Mexican novelist Haghenbeck (Bitter Drink, 2012) bases his version of her life on an imagined notebook called The Sacred Herbs Book in which Kahlo ties her favorite recipes to key moments and relationships in her life—the recipes are included in the text, then revised for an appendix directed overtly to book clubs. The novel follows the factual chronology of Kahlo’s life: her childhood polio, the bus accident in which she was severely injured and from which she never fully recovered, her tumultuous two marriages to Diego Rivera, her failure to have children, her many operations, her development as a painter, her early death when she was 47. Kahlo’s paintings are filled with her communistic politics and Mexican nationalism while offering a searing self-portrait of her sensuality and the physical pain she persistently endured while satisfying her huge appetite for life. The brightly colored surreal vision of Kahlo’s art informs both the childlike tone of the prose and the mysticism with which Haghenbeck adoringly surrounds his subject. The Day of the Dead is the novel’s central motif and the inevitability of death its theme. Kahlo, an atheist but highly spiritual, is warned by a “messenger” riding a white horse whenever someone is about to die. She knows her own life will last until her pet rooster dies, because she has made a deal with the ghostly “godmother” who will lead her into death—Kahlo will live when she should have died after the bus accident, but she will sacrifice with great suffering. Her ruminations on the meaning of life and death with various famous lovers, from Georgia O’Keeffe to Leon Trotsky, are full of gravitas but tend to run together after awhile, not unlike the recipes themselves.
Despite the repetitiousness and pretentious hyperbola that drags on this novel, Kahlo remains a rich character and inevitably irresistible.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3283-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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