An inventive, elegantly constructed, ably written peek into the secret lives of women from a historical perspective.
In Fowler’s latest (The Sweetheart Season, 1996, etc.), a shady lady from New Orleans crosses paths with a respectable spinster in Gilded Age San Francisco.
Rumor has it that Mrs. Pleasant passed for white when she arrived during the 1849 Gold Rush. A reputed voodoo queen, she was a beauty then and she’s rich now, even though she still works as a housekeeper for her first California lover, the mysterious Mr. Bell. Her specialty: arranging parties at which wealthy men meet wayward women and keeping track of the inevitable results: illegitimate children, many of whom she simply sells to the Chinese tongs. At least, those are the whispers Lizzie Hayes has heard. Fat, 40ish, and unmarried, Lizzie devotes her days to good works and her nights to romantic fantasies. She helps run the Ladies’ Relief and Protection Society Home for Girls, and it’s here that she meets Mrs. Pleasant, with unhappy waif Jenny Ijub clinging to the old lady’s skirts. Mrs. Pleasant drops subtle hints regarding a wealthy father who may well be persuaded to support this wrong-side-of-the-blanket offspring. The Home’s officials won’t approve, but the organization is perennially short of funds, so Lizzie reluctantly agrees to take in Jenny. She has nothing against the sullen child, and she’s drawn to Mrs. Pleasant, whose herbal concoctions cure her migraines. Lizzie even pays a call on Mr. Bell’s faintly disreputable but luxurious household and his languorous young wife, a visit that fires her romantic imagination in more than ways than one. But her sense of duty wins out: when a strange, shabbily dressed man visits the Home and asks to adopt Jenny, Lizzie acts on instinct and hides the girl. It’s not long before the man reveals the secret of Jenny’s parentage, then demands cash to keep his silence. Lizzie’s ultimate decision will surprise everyone.
An inventive, elegantly constructed, ably written peek into the secret lives of women from a historical perspective.Pub Date: May 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14750-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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