Essex delineates the confusion of historical events and historically accurate personalities with clarity, but she never...
In her third historical novel (Pharaoh, 2002, etc.), Essex shifts her focus to 15th-century Italy, where politics and art determine the private ambitions and intrigues of the Estes sisters.
Intellectual Isabella marries the handsome soldier Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, in 1490, when she is 15. The following year Isabella’s younger, tomboyish sister Beatrice marries the older, more controversial Ludovico, future Duke of Milan and patron of the wily Leonardo da Vinci, who creates his art according to his own schedule, despite Ludovico’s best attempts to control him. Leonardo has used Ludovico’s current mistress as the model for his classic The Lady with Ermine. During Beatrice’s wedding festivities, Isabella sees the painting, recognizes Leonardo’s genius and determines that the Maestro must paint her too. Meanwhile, Ludovico, for whom the adolescent Beatrice is little more than a baby-making machine, flirts with Isabella. Drawn to Ludovico’s intellect and his ambition, Isabella carries on a torrid year-long correspondence with Ludovico, but events and Francesco’s jealous suspicion keep them apart. Beatrice longs for her husband’s affection. When she finally gives Ludivico an ultimatum, her sudden gumption charms him into love and fidelity. Now Isabella, stuck in the boonies of Mantua, is the one pining, not for Ludovico but for the immortality Leonardo’s portrait would bestow. Unfortunately, protocol demands that Beatrice be painted first, and Beatrice does not want to be painted. For her, immortality resides “at the end of my husband’s cock.” With Beatrice’s help, Ludovico uses Milan’s fortune in military and political intrigue. Beatrice dies in 1495, age 22, after discovering Ludovico has cheated on her again. After Ludovico’s ultimate defeat by the French in 1499, Isabella, safe in Mantua because Francesco has not involved himself in Ludovico’s battles, invites Leonardo to visit. He sketches Isabella, but never completes the painting.
Essex delineates the confusion of historical events and historically accurate personalities with clarity, but she never quite achieves a sense of human urgency.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51706-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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