Putting 21st-century political correctness aside, compared to Lady Duff Gordon’s courage and complexity, Sally comes off as...
British novelist Pullinger (A Little Stranger, 2008, etc.), who collaborated with Jane Campion on the novelization of the film The Piano, reimagines history in her U.S. debut.
In a renowned series of letters still in print today, Lady Duff Gordon recorded her independent travels abroad, highly unusual for a woman of mid-19th-century England; Pullinger recounts her version of Lady Duff Gordon’s stay in Egypt through the eyes of her maid Sally, who receives brief mention in the letters. Suffering from tuberculosis, Lady Duff Gordon traveled on her doctor’s recommendation to Egypt in 1862, reluctantly leaving behind her husband and young children. Thirty-year-old Sally has served her mistress devotedly for a decade by the time they depart England. In Alexandria, Lady Duff Gordon hires as her dragoman—a combination of “an interpreter, a guide, a factotum”—Omar, a young Egyptian also mentioned in the actual letters. With Omar, the ladies set off down the Nile to Luxor, where they settle. Lady Duff Gordon is remarkably open to studying the people of Egypt as well as its antiquities. Soon she and Sally are dressing “native” without the stays so symbolic of Victorian England’s restrictiveness. The Upstairs/Downstairs mentality is abandoned when Lady Duff Gordon invites Sally and Omar to share her meals. But if mistress and maidservant are soon besotted with Egypt, Sally is also secretly besotted with Omar. Never mind that he’s married and a father. When Sally realizes she is pregnant, Omar promises to make her his second wife, legal in Egypt. Unfortunately, no one informs Lady Duff Gordon until she’s called to help Sally deliver her baby. Afterward, Lady Duff Gordon keeps Omar in her employ while demanding Sally return to England and hand her child over to Omar’s wife. Pullinger portrays Sally’s ultimate rebellion as a courageous act of independence and Lady Duff Gordon as an unforgiving puritan and snob.
Putting 21st-century political correctness aside, compared to Lady Duff Gordon’s courage and complexity, Sally comes off as a self-delusional, whiny adulteress.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9386-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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
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
PROFILES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
