A welcome spotlight on a neglected historical figure, but Manrique wobbles toward the end.
The story of Manuela Sáenz, mistress of the Liberator, Simón Bolívar, who chased the Spanish out of South America.
Quito, Ecuador, 1822. Bolívar, liberator of Venezuela and Colombia, enters the city as a conquering hero. Only 25, Manuela is a hero herself, having helped Peru attain its independence. She makes a play for the Liberator at the victory ball; captivated by her beauty and political savvy, he invites her to his room. Does the fact she’s married give Manuela pause? Hell, no! Off to a strong start, Manrique (Latin Moon in Manhattan, 1992, etc.) backtracks to Manuela’s origins. Born illegitimate on an Ecuadorean hacienda; raised by a hateful aunt and equally hateful nuns at a Quito boarding school, with only her female slaves, Jonotás and Natán, for friends; eventually acknowledged by her father, a wealthy businessman; married off by him to an English fleet owner living in Peru, where she joins the underground independence movement. Defying her husband, she lives openly with Bolívar in Lima until he returns to the battlefield, “his true mistress,” on which Manuela will cut a dashing figure herself. But there’s no drama there, for her military exploits will be narrated dryly by Natán. Lima is the high point for the lovers; they will have two much more difficult years together in Bogotá, Colombia, a hotbed of intrigue, before Bolívar dies. The much younger Manuela, now destitute, will live on for years, sustained by memories of the great man. The juicy tale of passion between two history-shaping free spirits, promised in that opening scene, never quite materializes. This is partly because the lovers are so often apart, but also because Manrique feels the need to provide historical balance, involving a synopsis of Colombia’s convoluted politics and Natán’s awkwardly inserted opinions that Bolívar is “cold and ruthless” and that the lovers have the makings of tyrants.
A welcome spotlight on a neglected historical figure, but Manrique wobbles toward the end.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-082070-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Rayo/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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