An inconsistent but ultimately worthwhile tale about two highly romanticized historical figures.
A fictional retelling of the events leading up to the only known meeting between Marilyn Monroe and Queen Elizabeth II.
The book opens in 1956 as Marilyn and her new husband, Arthur Miller, travel to England, where she’s slated to work on a film with Sir Laurence Olivier, “one of the greatest actors in the world.” The filming doesn’t go as planned. Marilyn finds herself talked down to by other actors as well as film executives. Still often thinking of herself as small-town Norma Jeane, she struggles to become Marilyn. Yet, when she does manage to conjure a more glamorous self, she worries she’s alienating her husband by being too flashy. The book alternates between these first-person glimpses into Marilyn’s life with chapters narrated by Queen Elizabeth as she adjusts to life as a young monarch while navigating relationships with family members. As her husband, Philip, watches her rise in power, he gradually disengages from their relationship, leading to copious rumors about his infidelity and their failing marriage. Just like Marilyn, Elizabeth is portrayed as a woman whose ascension to power may be too much for the man in her life. As the book alternates between the two women—leading up to a meeting between them—we see flashbacks to their very different childhoods and are privy to their inner thoughts as adults, which are perhaps surprisingly similar. The focus on events preceding the timeline of the novel means the pace sometimes lags, while details of the 1956 setting are too thin to ground the book in its time and place. Even so, the author manages to explore several deep issues that plague both women, ranging from the gap between private and public selves to ambition, self-doubt, and loyalty.
An inconsistent but ultimately worthwhile tale about two highly romanticized historical figures.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9798217093731
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
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 sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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