A sad, beautifully written, contemplative testament.
Five kind and honorable people are caught up in the depredations of the Great War in this first stand-alone novel by the author of the Maisie Dobbs mystery series (Leaving Everything Most Loved, 2013, etc.)
In 1914, as war looms, newlyweds Tom and Kezia Brissenden are making a go of the farm Tom inherited from his father, a farm that would have been part of the estate of wealthy gentleman Edmund Hawkes had not his great-grandfather lost it to Tom’s great-grandfather in a darts game. Kezia, a vicar’s daughter, is earnestly striving to supplant her finishing school ways with those of a farm wife, consulting a housewifery guide, The Woman’s Book. Although Hawkes is attracted to Kezia, he keeps a respectful distance, just as he is cordial but not friendly toward Tom. This distance persists as Tom and Hawkes both enlist and are sent to the front line in France, where Tom, a private, serves under Capt. Hawkes. Kezia keeps Tom’s spirits up with her letters describing the sumptuous meals she prepares for him in her imagination, where wartime food shortages and government inroads on the farm’s production aren't problems. The whole battalion soon looks forward to her letters and the occasional fruitcake. However, Tom is scapegoated by this novel’s closest thing to a villain, the cynical and embittered Sgt. Knowles, who resents the influx of so many green recruits. Meanwhile, Tom’s sister (and Kezia’s best friend), Thea, anguishes over whether she will be arrested for her activities as a suffragette and pacifist. Ultimately, she decides that the only way to escape government oppression is to reaffirm her loyalty: She becomes an ambulance driver at the front, where Kezia’s father, Rev. Marchant, is ministering to troops in the trenches. Without questioning either the cause of the war or the dubious tactics employed, seemingly, to ensure maximum loss of life for minimal military advantage, these characters simply get on with it, reaffirming our faith in the possibility of everyday nobility.
A sad, beautifully written, contemplative testament.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-222050-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
PROFILES
A bold, fertile work lit by powerful images, often consumed by debate, almost old-school in its feminist commitment.
Esther, the Old Testament teenager who reluctantly married a Persian king and saved her people, is connected across the ages to two more contemporary women in a sinuous, thoughtful braid of women’s unceasing struggles for liberty and identity.
Biblical Esther, second-wave feminist Vee, and contemporary mother-of-two Lily are the women whose narrative strands and differing yet sometimes parallel dilemmas are interwoven in Solomon’s (Leaving Lucy Pear, 2016, etc.) questing, unpredictable new novel. All three are grappling—some more dangerously than others—with aspects of male power versus their own self-determination. Esther, selected from 40 virgins to be the second queen—after her predecessor, Vashti, was banished (or worse)—is the strangest. Her magical powers can bring on a shocking physical transformation or reanimate a skeletal bird, yet she is still a prisoner in a gilded cage, mother to an heir, frustrated daughter of an imperiled tribe. Vee, wife of an ambitious senator in 1970s Washington, finds herself a player in a House of Cards–type scenario, pressured toward sexual humiliation by her unscrupulous husband. Lily, in 21st-century Brooklyn, has chosen motherhood over work and is fretting about the costumes for her two daughters to wear at the Purim carnival honoring Esther. Alongside questions of male dominance, issues of sexuality arise often, as do female communities, from Esther’s slave sisters to Vee’s consciousness-raising groups to Lily’s sewing circle. And while layers of overlap continue among the three women's stories—second wives, sewing, humming—so do subtly different individual choices. Finely written and often vividly imagined, this is a cerebral, interior novel devoted to the notion of womanhood as a composite construction made up of myriad stories and influences.
A bold, fertile work lit by powerful images, often consumed by debate, almost old-school in its feminist commitment.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-25701-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
This is a picture of war less as a series of impossible choices than as a vaguely romantic miasma.
A crime writer in occupied France finds himself in a plot more dangerous than any he's dreamed up.
Having been shot by the Gestapo, a man surreptitiously hands something to Paul Ricard just before dying: It appears to be a drawing specifying the technical details of a military weapon. After making some inquiries as to whom he might pass the papers to, Ricard finds himself volunteering for the Resistance and, under the guise of a journalist, traveling to Germany to make contact with the conscripted Polish workers who can explain the document. As with his other novels, Furst (A Hero of France, 2016, etc.) bases his tale on a lesser-known nugget of World War II history, in this case, the Polish laborers forced to build U-boats who took their revenge by smuggling technical information to the French Resistance, who forwarded it to British intelligence. But the tension has, for the moment, gone out of Furst's work, and the elliptical and compact writing style he developed has devolved into a kind of drifting, random series of scenes that never accumulate into more. There is still a fine sense of the details of life during wartime, the strange and pregnant heaviness that lies over the most banal activities. What's missing, though, are the moments when that heaviness bursts forth.
This is a picture of war less as a series of impossible choices than as a vaguely romantic miasma.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-59230-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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