The splendor and tumult of the Italian Renaissance live con brio in this page-turning tale of a remarkable young Jewish woman whose love for a Christian nobleman divides her heart and soul. Parks, a professor emerita in the NYU dramatic-writing program, draws upon a brief reference to this young woman in a period history and develops it into a story as rich as Raphael's tapestries—which her Jewish heroine, Grazia, must guard when the Germans sack Rome in 1527. Grazia, her young son Danilo, and her employer Madonna Isabella, the Marchesana of Mantova, are eventually allowed to leave Rome—but at a high price. Grazia's life seems, in fact, to have been shaped by a series of upheavals and flights. Remembering them now, she is taken back to her first flight, in childhood, from Mantova, during a pogrom, when her family takes shelter with her wealthy grandparents, the Rossis. The Rossis are bankers and humanist scholars, and Grazia gains a remarkable education. But while her scholarly talents bring her fame—she publishes a book—and work (she eventually becomes the secretary of the Marchesa, a woman close to the center of power in Renaissance Rome), her life, shaped by war, plague, and persecution, is changed forever by her encounter with the dashing Lord Pirro when he arrives, still a student, at the Rossi bank in search of a loan. The two become lovers but are parted when the reluctant Pirro is compelled to marry his family's choice. These meetings and partings are repeated though the pair's event-filled lives as Pirro becomes a soldier and Grazia marries Judah, who becomes a physician to the Pope. At one unexpected reunion with Pirro, Danilo is conceived. But history is indifferent even to the most intense of lovers, especially in troubled times, and the estimable Grazia will meet an unhappy fate. A genuine Renaissance woman memorably struts her stuff in a first novel that consummately mixes fact and fancy. Historical fiction at its best.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-81603-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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