A new and enchanting Riley period masque, featuring an innocent heroine who escapes the snares of the 16th-century Mighty: royal heavies; their beady-eyed minions; lethal conquistadors; even a released demon, dank, smelly, smoking from the ears, and a bibulous angel. As in the delightful The Oracle Glass (1994), the real personages here—from Henry VIII's Thomas Wolsey through a brace of French kings, their courts, and jumpy kin—simmer in Riley's amused regard while History stirs the action. The story opens in 1514 when narrator Susanna Dallet, whose late father, a brilliant Flemish artist, taught her his painterly secrets, discovers that her husband is a philandering lout—and one soon murdered, presumably by an enraged husband. Unbeknownst to Susanna, Master Dallet's demise was engineered as part of a scheme by a freelance necromancer to rule the world—while another group, a secret society pledged to unseat the ruling family of France, holds torchlit meetings to plot its dirty doings. Meanwhile, back at the castles of the Great: Wolsey, who's been running England for King Henry and who's been watching enemy France ``like a cat at a mousehole,'' arranges the marriage of Henry's young sister, flighty Mary, to the dying Louis XII. It's Susanna's superb copy of Mary's portrait that alerts Wolsey to her fiction of being merely her husband's agent, and so, as a full-fledged painter and a real curiosity—a woman artist!—she's sent to France for, perhaps, a bit of spying. The royal marriage and muddy festivities go forward as French and English nobles mine the landscape with plots; a demon, gorged on all the free-floating greed and malice, has a wonderful time; and a cheerful angel and his cherubs lever Susanna from very tight spots—before she finds True Love at last. Spooky, riotous, headlong action; ivory-clear satires of power-players; a spot of comic grue, enticing period ambiance, and prose alluringly luminous: a top-notch re-creation.
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-86661-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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
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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