The labors of love take on new meaning here, but despite the hypnotic quality of the prose, too many shadows fall across the...
Starting with a grisly murder scene, Myerson’s fourth novel (after Me and the Fat Man, 1999, etc.) probes murky waters in Victorian London, as a woman crippled and in love trades in her surgeon husband for a married laborer.
Laura Blundy does the dark deed, bludgeoning her carrot-topped spouse Ewan, first with a piece of sculpture, then with her crutch, and finally by poking a poker into his brain—all because he reacts negatively when she says she’s leaving him. There’s more to her reaction than meets the eye, of course: her middle-class childhood having ended when her father died and she was thrown into the streets, Laura embraced that urban underworld willingly. She bore a son after being raped, but gave him to an orphanage rather than keep him with her in the workhouse, only to be told a few years later that he’d died. Despondent, jailed on suspicion of having murdered another child, she saw her life going nowhere—and then a taxi carriage ran over her leg. Enter Ewan, the hospital surgeon who first tries to save her limb, then has to amputate it, all the while falling desperately in love with his paradox of a patient, the lovely woman who embodies good breeding and coarse carnality. Laura marries him, but theirs is a fitful passion, overseen by Ewan’s crone of a mother who lives with them. He wants children, Laura doesn’t. When Laura throws herself into the Thames to escape Ewan’s demands, she’s pulled out by Billy, a worker helping build the London sewer—and a new love is born. It’s a haunting union that neither can explain at first but both ardently desire; as its dreamlike nature unfolds, Laura must make room for Billy, then must persuade her lover to run away with her, leaving his own family behind.
The labors of love take on new meaning here, but despite the hypnotic quality of the prose, too many shadows fall across the heart of Laura Blundy, concealing more than they reveal.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57322-168-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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