A first novel from Sherwood (the collection Everything You've Heard is True, 1989) that mines with varying success a current favorite literary lode—the Shelley/Godwin mÇnage. Admitting that her novel is based only loosely on the actual life of Mary Wollstonecraft, that woman of ``high genius'' and ``strong passions,'' Sherwood takes the familiar details of this early feminist's life and, with a contemporary sensibility, attempts to turn them into a vivid re-creation of the way it might have been. She begins with a childhood shadowed by the failures of Mary's father and his beatings of her mother, actions that Mary tried but failed to prevent. Forced to earn money for the family, Mary became a companion to a widow, a governess in Ireland, and, with her two sisters and beloved friend Fanny, opened a school. But ambitious and determined to be independent and escape the servitude of marriage—``the oppression of the weak by the strong''—her ambitions remained unfocused until she met the dissenter Dr. Price, who not only befriended her but introduced her to the writings of thinkers like Hume, Rousseau, and Locke. Mary at first diffidently, then with greater confidence, began to write and, once published, supported herself by writing and translating. She became a member of London's radical set and dined regularly with men such as William Blake and Thomas Paine, though her intellectual success was undercut by her emotional needs and an underlying sense of unworthiness, the lingering legacy of her unhappy childhood. It was a legacy that led to disastrous love affairs—first with the painter Fuseli, then with American Gilbert Imlay, the father of her first daughter, Fanny—and to time in Bedlam, as well as a suicide attempt. A persuasive interpretation, but Mary's extraordinary life is often overwhelmed by the relentless inclusion of historical data extraneous to a celebration of the imagination.
Pub Date: May 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-374-28390-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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