Incestuous rape understandably sends a wealthy Chicago teenager into a quarter century of celibacyuntil her passions are awakened by a kindly archaeologist and the chance to undo her malefactor. Midwestern melodrama from the husband and wife Wealth, Glamour, and Power (Inheritance, Private Affairs, A Ruling Passion) specialist team. No wicked stepmother could be more odious or evil than Anne Chatham's handsome, vile uncle Vince, who, under the noses of Anne's large, immensely wealthy but astonishingly unnoticing family, sexually enslaves the motherless child for two years until she at last denounces him at her 15th birthday dinner in 1967. Fleeing her semi-credulous relatives, Anne leaves the Chicago suburbs for Haight-Ashbury, where she pulls herself together and begins a life alone that takes her through Berkeley to Harvard Law (top marks always, of course) and on to a lucrative career dealing in L.A. divorces. But returning to Chicago for her grandfather's funeral, Anne is sucked back into the family drama. Uncle Vince, renounced by his father after Anne's accusations, is now a Denver zillionaire senator with an eye on the White House. Anne's father is losing most of his fortune in inept developments, and the younger generation of Chathams has upped stakes for Tamarack, the Aspenlike ski resort developed by grandpa. Uncle Vince is not happy to see Anne back in town. She and her unhappy memories could send his career into a tailspin. He begins a series of machinations intended to eliminate Anne and, while he's at it, to take revenge for his excommunication by wiping out the family's ski-slopes-for- the-superrich business. Meanwhile, Josh Durant, Anne's handsome, scholarly, deeply rich admirer, flies back and forth between Tamarack, where he woos the still chilly Anne and where he is accused of heinous crimes, and Luxor, Egypt, where he has discovered a deeply rich tomb with a completely intact Pharaoh and where he hopes Anne will discover her deeply buried feelings. Upmarket Harlequin. Middle-class values prevail no matter how many millions are flung about.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-64893-4
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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