A century and a half after Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and those sly Brontës still decline to divulge their secrets.
The life of Daphne du Maurier (1907-89), popular author of romantic suspense fiction, including the classic Rebecca, is the inspiration for veteran author Picardie’s speculative biographical novel.
The action spans the years 1957-60 and evolves from the conflicting ambitions of three major characters. Primus inter pares is du Maurier herself, now 50, internationally famous and more than financially secure (thanks in part to Alfred Hitchcock’s tingling film version of Rebecca). She is nevertheless troubled by the infidelity of her oafish husband Tommy, and by stalled work on her definitive biography of the “other” Brontë: the celebrated sisters’ unstable brother Branwell, believed by many (including Daphne) to be the real genius of the insular Yorkshire clan. But the Brontës have of course spawned a competitive army of scholars, and Daphne’s fears that her original work will be ignored or overshadowed are exacerbated by the machinations of John Alexander Symington, curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth (and also a real person, to whom a scandalous reputation still adheres). The third protagonist is an initially unnamed doctorate student who is researching the carefully sheltered life of—you guessed it, reader—eminent author Daphne du Maurier. Picardie has assembled promising ingredients for a literature-inflected satirical mystery, perhaps along the lines of Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, or even Vladimir Nabokov’s ineffably mischievous Pale Fire. But Daphne is dull, its inherently dramatic romantic-Gothic materials flattened into tiresome scholarspeak and redundant exchanges of discoveries and theories among rival researchers. One admires Picardie’s own evidently scrupulous research, but it remains fodder for discussion, inert and unwelcoming on every page. Nor has Picardie escaped the trap of attempting to persuade readers of the “genius” of a might-have-been about whom far too little is known.
A century and a half after Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and those sly Brontës still decline to divulge their secrets.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59691-341-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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