Prolix and period-appropriate language lends humor and an arch, Thackeray-esque tone but palls after hundreds of pages...
Following in Darwin’s footsteps, an actress leads an expedition to Galapagos.
Morrow’s picaresque novel, set circa 1850, is intended to be rollicking but ends up simply tedious. Chloe Bathurst, who specializes in ingénue roles in some of London’s most lurid melodramas, loses her employ through a comic series of events and, by an even quirkier twist, is hired by Charles Darwin as a zookeeper to live specimens he brought back to England. When Chloe learns of the Shelley Prize, whereby the late poet’s followers will award a large sum to whomever can prove the existence—or not—of God, she swipes a précis of Darwin’s longer treatise on evolution and, through yet another improbable turn, is commissioned by the Shelley Society to head for Galapagos to prove Darwin’s theories (which she has misrepresented as her own). In her party are her cardsharp twin brother, Algernon, an episcopal cleric, Chadwick, a rakish ex-pirate, Dartworthy, a dissolute sea captain, etc.; almost as if one of her melodramas had been transposed to the high seas. After being shipwrecked, Chloe’s expedition finds itself on a barge in the Amazon jungle, where it suffers attrition thanks to piranhas and an anaconda snake. After a bout of malaria, Chloe gets religion and almost abandons her quest, but then Chadwick informs her that a rival church-sponsored expedition is on its way to the Galapagos to exterminate every tortoise, lizard and iguana. Occasionally Morrow cuts away to that expedition’s progress and also to another candidate for the prize who is traveling the Middle East in search of Noah’s Ark. When Chloe and her crew get bogged down in the Peruvian rubber wars, despite their noble aims of rescuing natives enslaved on the latex plantations, readers too may be tempted to abandon the quest.
Prolix and period-appropriate language lends humor and an arch, Thackeray-esque tone but palls after hundreds of pages wherein the plot flags and the characters never truly reveal themselves.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05401-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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