An impressive piece of mimicry, but readers in search of droll comic fiction depicting the madness inherited, so to speak,...
This almost defiantly plummy first novel by a Scots writer labors to out-Austen the immortal Jane in a deceptively mild-mannered exploration of the conflicting claims of love, property, and propriety set in a Derbyshire village near the end of the 18th century.
When jovial, empty-headed country squire Nathaniel Horne (kin to Fielding’s abrasive Squire Western) perishes in a ludicrous accident, his young son Edward stands to inherit the family’s handsome estate (and the eponymous “temple”) Winterbourne. Thirteen years pass, and Edward grows to manhood, as well as an appreciation of, not just Winterbourne, but his powerful neighbor Sir Anthony Apreece’s unhappy younger wife Daisy. Sir Anthony wants the Horne lands as much as Edward and Daisy want each other, and the story settles into a succession of (rather redundant) scenes detailing the plots in which all three involve themselves. Fleming echoes the relaxed style of the roomy traditional novel quite skillfully, filling it with both an enormity of convincing décor, idiom, detail, and walk-on characters burdened with aggressively eccentric names (Tom Glossipp, Augustus Spratchett, Digbeth Chiddlestone, et al). He also creates a nice contrast between Sir Anthony’s righteous avarice and the “unreal world” of equality for women that Daisy finds only in Fanny Burney’s popular novel Evelina. It’s all entertaining enough, but it moves at the pace of a promenade: observation, conversation, and commentary pretty much dwarf the story’s inherent drama—at least until a very odd melodramatic climax (which seems to have wandered in from another novel entirely) triggered by Sir Anthony’s vicious exploitation of Robert Pumphrey, a banker and moneylender determined not to become the villain people assume he already is.
An impressive piece of mimicry, but readers in search of droll comic fiction depicting the madness inherited, so to speak, from the activities of landownership and love may as well stick with Austen and Trollope.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7868-6676-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
