Limburg succeeds in humanizing Anne and bringing her worldview to vivid life.
Limburg’s first novel is an intimate portrait of a Stuart princess whom history has occasionally underestimated.
Princess Anne, daughter of James, Duke of York, and niece of Charles II, the monarch who occupies the newly restored throne of England, grows up at a sensitive time. As a child, Anne is coddled and encouraged to gorge herself in a court relishing pleasure after 30 years of Puritan rule. Older sister Mary weds Prince William of Orange, a short, hunchbacked general Anne thinks of as “this Dutch Abortion.” As she matures, Anne forms a particularly close friendship with Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, one of her ladies-in-waiting. Anne’s arranged marriage to George, Prince of Denmark, proves to be a love match. However, childbearing is problematic for both royal sisters: Mary cannot conceive, and Anne, despite at least 17 pregnancies before age 35, gives birth to only one comparatively healthy child, her son, William, Duke of Gloucester. After Charles’ death, the ongoing clash between Papism and Anglicanism continues to divide many families, not least the royals: though Anne and Mary are firm Protestants, their father, James II, who ascends to the throne, is Catholic. Mary and William depose James and restore a Protestant regime, which they rule jointly. Anne is next in line followed by Gloucester. Her former regard for Mary quickly cools, as Mary restricts her allowance, criticizes her gambling, and, in the ultimate betrayal, forces Sarah from Anne’s side. The narrative is linear, providing serial glimpses into Anne’s obsessions, anxieties, and many physical challenges, including smallpox as a child, miscarriages, stillbirths, and crippling gout. Small scenes are telling: Anne’s enmity toward William of Orange is amply summed up when he hogs a dish of peas. This is decidedly a scholarly approach to historical fiction, complete with scrupulous adherence to the diction of the day and excerpts from Anne’s actual correspondence. The abrupt and inconclusive ending appears to signal a sequel.
Limburg succeeds in humanizing Anne and bringing her worldview to vivid life.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68177-259-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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