A compelling yet heartbreaking homage to the mother of computer science.
Mother-daughter tension sets the stage for this closely researched portrait of Ada Lovelace, the only legitimate daughter of poet Lord Byron.
Chiaverini’s (Fates and Traitors, 2016, etc.) latest historical novel details Ada’s struggles to please her mother, Lady Byron, nee Annabella Milbanke, who so feared that Ada would succumb to the influence of Byron’s bad blood that she forbade the child from reading poetry or indulging in any flight of fancy. Annabelle’s own turbulent marriage to Byron lasted less than a year. She worried that Byron suffered from either madness or, worse, moral corruption, and after discovering his incestuous liaison with his half sister, Augusta, she fled with 7-week-old Ada. Thus began Ada’s lifelong struggle to please her mother by suppressing half her lineage. Chiaverini details Ada’s trials and tribulations with her mother’s jealous dismissal of nurses and governesses who dared to tell the girl fairy tales. The emotionally neglected child became a ticking time bomb, eager to rush into inappropriate intimacies. Ada nevertheless became a profoundly talented and imaginative mathematician. Cast as Ada’s memoir, Chiaverini’s novel uses lines from Byron’s poetry as chapter titles, charting Ada’s discovery of her own talents and acceptance of her father’s influence. Eventually, Ada found her closest friends in Mary Somerville and Charles Babbage, both of whom encouraged her intellectual creativity, as did her supportive husband, William, Lord King. Yet as Ada’s intellect brilliantly wed practical mathematics to poetic genius, her ambition was constantly undercut; even her beloved Babbage presumed she would subordinate her career to his work. Arguably the first person to conceive of computer programming—an idea inspired by watching looms—Ada should have been lauded for her contributions to mathematics and technology. Yet her mother’s, her husband’s, and her society’s ideas about appropriate behavior for women suppressed her genius.
A compelling yet heartbreaking homage to the mother of computer science.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98520-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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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