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
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
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
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