Sexy and dashing.
Liberty and libertinage, reason and magic—the conflicting passions of the French Revolution swirl throughout the adventures of Elzelina van Aylde-Versfelt.
Based upon the real life of Maria Versfelt (alias Ida St. Elme)—courtesan, actress and writer—Graham’s (Stealing Fire, 2010, etc.) latest entwines history, romance and a delicious dollop of fantasy. Hearing voices and seeing ghosts in mirrors, the women of Elza’s family have always stood a bit outside society’s bounds. The mirrors and the death of her only son, Charles, have maddened Elza’s mother. Elza comforts her mother by cross-dressing as Charles, which soon becomes a habit—for it is, indeed, easier and safer to travel as a man. Soon, Charles becomes an alter ego. In addition to teasing gender lines, Elza has herself seen the image of her true love in the tarot card image of the King of Chalices. By 12, she has been coerced into marriage to handsome Jan Ringeling. Seven years and two children later, she finds herself chained to a cold man with political aspirations but little talent. Elza makes a daring escape, cross-dressing and fleeing her enraged husband (who threatens to have her confined as mad, just like her mother). She seeks protection from a commander in the French army, the brilliant military strategist Victor Moreau. Yet his protection comes at an interesting price: Elza must become his mistress. So begins an erotic metamorphosis from Elza, the dutiful wife, to Ida, the seductive courtesan. On Moreau’s arm, Ida enters Parisian society, gaining admiration from men and women alike. Yet, the tarot card reading lingers with her. While she respects Victor, she longs to find the King of Chalices. On her journey towards her red-haired beloved, Ida/Elza becomes an actress, a medium channeling an angel and even Bonaparte’s paramour.
Sexy and dashing.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6721-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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