Fluid prose enhances this light, enjoyable visit to the 1930s.
In an imaginative caper set in 1935, a dimwitted assistant consul for cultural affairs in Italy devises a plan to kidnap child superstar Shirley Temple.
Durham (Unforeseen Complications, 2017, etc.) and Smith (The Gatekeeper, 2016, etc.) join forces to meld their respective areas of interest—old-Hollywood-based mystery writing and the life of Marguerite Alice “Missy” LeHand, the private secretary to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In this novel, Missy and her assistant, Grace Tully, are vacationing in California while the president is away on a fishing trip. They’ve arranged to tour the Twentieth Century Fox studios, where they meet the irrepressible Shirley. Missy, Grace, and Gertrude Temple, Shirley’s mother, decide that it would be fun to go on a trip together to San Francisco aboard the new Coast Daylight train. When Shirley learns that the forces of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini have invaded Ethiopia, she says, “Why doesn’t somebody tell Mussolini to stop?” Her comment winds up in Louella Parsons’s gossip column, inciting Il Duce’s fury, and he orders San Francisco–based Italian consul Cosimo Palladino to respond to the insult. Fausto Trevisano, a wannabe movie star, is working at the consulate, and he assures Palladino that he has a solution. Fausto contacts Shirley’s acquaintance, struggling stuntman Andy Archie, and they arrange to kidnap the child from the train. Joan Roswell, who’s trying to make it as a Hollywood reporter, unwittingly becomes an accessory to the kidnapping. This smoothly flowing story is set against a serious backdrop—the lead-up to World War II and Roosevelt’s attempt to keep Mussolini from aligning with German chancellor Adolf Hitler—but the mystery plot is mostly a lark. It’s ably carried by a substantial ensemble cast, which includes an important performance by film director Darryl F. Zanuck and a few cameo appearances by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. It’s also loaded with insider-y moviemaking details, and it even offers a few peeks into the personal side of the White House. The scenes aboard the Coast Daylight will make readers yearn for the days of pre-jet travel, and quirky bad guys add a surprise twist to the well-paced mayhem.
Fluid prose enhances this light, enjoyable visit to the 1930s.Pub Date: March 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-983873-90-4
Page Count: 390
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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