Lovely writing and evocative details salvage a thin story.
A moody novel about disfigured soldiers and hard-won love set in an English country manor during World War I.
Young, haughty Catherine, a recent war widow, acquiesces when her husband’s last wish—that their estate be used as a wartime hospital—is put in motion. The grand rooms are emptied to make way for hospital beds and metal cabinets, and strangely, all mirrors are removed, at the instruction of Dr. McCleary, the head surgeon. What Catherine later discovers is that all the soldiers suffer from some facial trauma and disfigurement—she wonders how she can ever have dinner parties in the house again with such ugliness staining the walls. Gentle Dr. McCleary has little patience for spoiled Catherine, who cautiously stays to her rooms. McCleary finds companionship with Dr. Kazanjian, an American dentist with a genius for inventing devices for facial reconstruction. He brought with him fellow American Anna Coleman, an artist he is in love with, and who will help McCleary document the reconstructive transformations they attempt. In this slow-moving work, much is given over to the fatigue and desperation of the medical staff attempting to save the men from life-long shunning, and to the suffering of the patients, who, though they can’t see themselves, can see each other. McCleary befriends Julian, the patient chosen for Anna’s first portrait. What unexpectedly arises is the fascination Catherine develops for him. Vaguely unhinged, Catherine begins to feel that her late husband Charles somehow inhabits Julian, who is pleased with the romantic attention. They begin an affair, half of Julian’s face covered by bandage. McCleary, meanwhile, unable to help Julian further, asks Anna to create a mask for the damaged side of Julian’s face. Through some clever mischief, Catherine switches Julian’s photo with that of her husband’s. Shields (The Fig Eater, 2000) succeeds in creating this gray, desperate time in an elegant language, but for all the beautifully detailed atmosphere, the plot feels secondary.
Lovely writing and evocative details salvage a thin story.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-78528-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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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