A stiff comedy of manners set in a London club.
A men-only social club resists the pressures of modernity in this satirical novel by a pseudonymous “gentleman.”
You will find all sorts of people in Macready’s, one of the oldest and most exclusive social clubs in London: actors, playwrights, politicians, judges, barristers, solicitors, musicians, military officers, and captains of industry. The only sort of person you will not find in Macready’s Club is a woman. It’s been that way since the 19th century, and the preference of a slim majority of members to keep it so is beginning to hurt the club’s public image. As pressure grows for prominent members to quit the club if the rule isn’t changed, the hardliners discover at least one whistleblower is in their midst. The spy is feeding information to Brigit van der Linden, the “self-employed, self-publicised, self-obsessed” human rights barrister who has taken up the desegregation crusade. Brigit’s protest campaign appears to be on the verge of success, especially after one of the club’s most vocal opponents of female membership, the Honorable Hector Floodgate, is expelled from Macready’s over his pranks—but Hector’s death soon afterward changes everything. It turns out Hector has bequeathed 200 million pounds to Macready’s, but only under the condition that the club remain restricted to gentlemen. Will the reformers find a way to overcome such a massive bribe? Though the novel takes contemporary gender politics as its topic, the real target of its satire is the reactionary but conflict-averse temperament of the British upper class. Unfortunately, the jokes are so mild and trite that the reader is often in danger of missing them, as when the narrator quips about Brigit’s appearance: “It would be inappropriate to offer any physical description of Brigit van der Linden…because to do so would objectify her; and if I even tip-toed in that direction, her very name might leap from the page to berate me.” The narrative proceeds with low stakes and a ponderous pace, and would have benefited from more fully defined characters and sharper observations about society.
A stiff comedy of manners set in a London club.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781913438852
Page Count: 182
Publisher: aSys Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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