A thoroughly researched, elegantly written historical tale.
Evans (Deadly Reunion, 2011, etc.) creatively imagines the private life of Mary Rose Tudor in this richly textured historical novel.
The English Tudors’ royal history is dominated by a cast of terrifying, imposing characters; the larger-than-life figures of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, for example, provide plenty of fuel for the contemporary imagination. As a result, authors often disregard such intriguing personalities as Princess Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s favorite sister, and Evans seeks to rectify this oversight. As this novel opens, Mary is having a heated discussion with her brother, the king, who has just announced that she will wed Louis XII of France, an ailing monarch who’s more than 30 years her senior. Mary is vehemently opposed to this decision and confronts Henry in a tone with which no subject would dare address a sovereign: “No, I won’t marry that feeble, pocky old man.” The author’s forte is her ability to reach beyond historians’ accounts and imagine such intimate moments. As the novel develops, she constructs an elaborate psychological profile of Mary; readers learn about how she recoils at the thought of touching Louis’ clammy skin and of her horror when she finds out that the French king let many of his subjects die in order not to disturb a ball held in her honor. After her marriage, the story focuses on the young queen’s complex relationships with the French royal family. It also addresses Mary’s desires as a woman—namely, her love for Charles Brandon, one of Henry VIII’s courtiers. After Louis’ death, Mary and Charles marry in secret. When Henry finds out, he forgives Charles, but the marriage soon weighs heavily on the newlyweds and changes the nature of their relationship. Much later, Mary has a difficult time with her eldest daughter, Frances, which adds to her torment as she pines for her son, Henry, who died at an early age. Traditionalists may recoil at the novel’s subtly contemporary edge, but it succeeds in reanimating an overlooked period of Tudor history.
A thoroughly researched, elegantly written historical tale.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Solo Books
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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