A clever reworking, though not completely convincing.
Kalogridis (The Borgia Bride, 2005, etc.) chronicles the perils of young Lisa di Antonio Gherardini long before she became the subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting.
“Known . . . to those of the common class [as] ‘Monna Lisa,’ ” she is the only child of a rich Florentine wool merchant with close ties to the ruling Medici family. In 1478, a year before Lisa was born, an attempt to slaughter the Medicis during mass ended the life of Lorenzo’s beloved younger brother Giuliano. Two of the murderers were hunted down and executed; a third remains at large 13 years later, when Lisa’s epileptic mother dies at the hands of fanatical priests who believe she is possessed. Within a month of witnessing her mother’s horrible end, Lisa is summoned to the home of Lorenzo de’ Medici, head of the family and a dazzlingly wealthy patron of the arts. He displays a mysterious fondness for the girl and commissions reigning artist Leonardo to paint her portrait. On his deathbed not long after, Lorenzo promises Lisa a large dowry and mumbles something about “the third man.” With his demise and the political turmoil among rival families that ensues, Lisa and her father are caught in dangerous limbo. (Also as a result of Lorenzo’s death, Leonardo’s portrait of her languishes.) Lisa falls in love with Lorenzo’s son Giuliano, named after his dead uncle, and they secretly marry. Giuliano is chased into exile in Rome, but Lisa, pregnant with his baby, is told he is dead. She agrees to marry her father’s odious savior, Francesco del Giocondo, although he is much older; moreover, she soon chillingly learns that Francesco has ties to the third murderer. The author provides plenty of cloak-and-dagger goings-on as Lisa reconnects with Leonardo, who lives in hiding because of his past ties to the Medicis, and reveals some stunning secrets about her mother. The story is endearingly told in Lisa’s sweet, gullible voice, but the characters ring more romantic than true, especially Leonardo.
A clever reworking, though not completely convincing.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34139-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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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