A well-informed, intuitive account of a singular modernist writer whose life is cut short.
A historical novel reconstructs the life of Katherine Mansfield as she becomes a noted short story writer and critic while battling tuberculosis.
Though Mansfield’s life begins in New Zealand in the late 19th century, she makes her mark on the literary world in England. An eventual friend and contemporary of Virginia Woolf, Mansfield is sent to Queens College in London at the age of 14. In New Zealand after graduation, Mansfield persuades her wealthy father to let her return to England to pursue a career in the arts. He grudgingly agrees, offering her a small allowance, hoping that poverty will convince her to come home. In London, she dabbles in music and performance and becomes a hit at parties. But the literary world beckons, and after her first short story collection is published, she connects with and eventually marries John Middleton Murry, the publisher of a new literary journal. Unfortunately, an earlier fling in Bavaria leaves her with gonorrhea and then she contracts tuberculosis. As her literary star is rising due to her innovative stream-of-consciousness style, Mansfield becomes increasingly more ill and flees to Italy for better weather. During a protracted five-year battle with TB, she seeks a miracle cure while never ceasing to write stories and reviews, creating an impressive body of work in a very short lifetime. FitzPatrick’s heavily researched novel, which focuses mainly on the five years that Mansfield fights her battle with TB, truly gets into the head of the innovative writer as she balances career, a shaky marriage, and a fatal illness while struggling financially. The dialogue and period details are convincing, and bright spots come from close friends, including Woolf, but mostly the bizarrely devoted Ida Baker, a writer, whom FitzPatrick re-creates with generosity. The story is a tragic one, but the author deftly captures Mansfield’s fervent dedication to her craft and her unwavering hope that she will overcome her illness.
A well-informed, intuitive account of a singular modernist writer whose life is cut short.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9916549-8-7
Page Count: 308
Publisher: La Drome Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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