A most enjoyable setup for the Scottish play, but be sure to read the original, too.
A prequel to Shakespeare’s Macbeth told in modern prose.
An 11th-century widow and her 10-year-old son are called “the Lady” and “the boy,” as if their names don’t matter. Indeed, her life is shaped wholly by men. The thane Macbeth has murdered her husband—burned him alive—and now moves into the woman’s castle. Not only does she not mind, but they fall in love and marry. Do the castle gossips call it an unholy union? As well they might, and the boy resents both his mother and Macbeth. She tells her son that together they can teach Macbeth how to be a father and a husband. “It is harsh, this world,” the mother says. “It is so hard to find love in it….We are fortunate if we find the smallest drop.” Drops of love are scant in this tale, while drops of blood are much easier to find. Morris doesn’t handle the plot quite as Shakespeare did, with witches and a murder scheme. This is less the story of Macbeth than it is the story of the missus. She is spooked by apparitions and a mysterious voice that says, “You shall be queen hereafter.” It’s hard for her to imagine how, as Duncan is king. But then her trusted “coz” Macduff reminds her that Macbeth is second in line. If you’ve read the play, you already know where we’re headed, but don’t let that stop you from reading this beautiful interpretation, which is so rich in its descriptions and well-crafted characters. Yes, night is a frightening time to be in the woods, but “ghosts melt away at the whiff of dawn.” There are mormaers and crones, thanes and witches, ambition and vengeance. And did we mention blood? Oh yes. Even the minor characters are fun, like the boy’s tutor Broccin, who despises children: They should all be sent to monasteries, “where the years might drain them of their insouciance like leeches applied to the body.”
A most enjoyable setup for the Scottish play, but be sure to read the original, too.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780593715383
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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