Still, a fascinating look at the particular manias and obsessions of those who study the stars amid turmoil on Earth.
Pipkin’s panoramic second novel (Woodsburner, 2009) unfurls a vista of scientific advances and social unraveling as the 18th century nears its close.
Arthur Ainsworth, a Londoner orphaned by an epidemic, inherits New Park, a manor estate in Ireland, where he's able to pursue his hobby and main passion, astronomy. Telescopes, a new invention, are rudimentary and scarce: Arthur must commission his own from one of his tenants, the local blacksmith, Owen. Soon after his wife dies in childbirth, Arthur adopts a foundling whom Owen took in and names her Caroline. Only Owen and his family, including his nephew and apprentice, Finn, know the infant is not Arthur's daughter by blood. Meanwhile, in Bath, a musician named William Herschel, who had to leave Hanover after deserting the army, and his sister, also confusingly named Caroline but known as Lina, are similarly drawn to astronomy: William, like Arthur, is intent on discovering a new planet and devising better telescopes, and Lina acts as his assistant, collaborator, and calculator, as does Caroline for Arthur. (The Herschels are real historical characters.) Now blind from gazing at the sun, Arthur is enraged to learn that William has won the race to find a new planet. Caroline, meanwhile, is smitten with Finn, whom she spies on with a telescope, and Finn loves her as well, but both are too timid to declare their feelings. After Arthur dies after falling from New Park’s roof (or did he jump?), his unscrupulous land agent destroys his will, dispossessing Caroline. Owen and his wife are also evicted and die on the road. Ignorant of one another’s fate, Caroline and Finn each flee Ireland, where rebellion against English landlords is brewing, she to London and he to Edinburgh. The novel is divided by Arthur’s death into two discrete parts, and the second half, dominated by the bloody Irish uprising of 1798, never really gels with the first.
Still, a fascinating look at the particular manias and obsessions of those who study the stars amid turmoil on Earth.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 9781632861870
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
PROFILES
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
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