A fine novel embroidered with rich imagery.
Iris Dunleavy is an abolitionist married to a slaveholder, a sane woman committed to an insane asylum, a married woman falling in love with another man.
Hepinstall’s latest novel (Prince of Lost Places, 2003, etc.) refracts the Civil War through the lenses of parallel conflicts: husbands and wives, fathers and sons, doctors and patients. Given rich psychological dimensions, each character strives to negotiate the lines balancing desire and control, power and compassion. The lines converge within the character of Iris, who longs for adventure. She has lived a comfortable, secure girlhood, and boys are lined up wanting to marry her. But all those boys are too familiar, so when Robert Dunleavy, plantation owner and slaveholder, comes to town, Iris is enthralled. Despite her father’s misgivings, Iris marries Robert and enters married life happily—until she discovers the ugly underbelly of slavery. After embarrassing Robert, Iris is committed to Sanibel Asylum, populated with souls disturbed by the sheer difficulty of living. Along the way, three men enter Iris’ life. Dr. Cowell hides his desire for power under the veneer of the consummate medical professional. Proud of his research linking the suffragette movement to increasing numbers of women committed to insane asylums, Cowell despairs of reforming Iris into a proper, submissive wife. Or perhaps his feelings run in a less-professional vein? Cowell’s son, Wendell, on the cusp of adulthood, is just beginning to learn about the roles society imposes on men and women. Troubled by his memories of a past patient, Wendell is drawn to Iris, yet he, too, struggles to understand his own desires. And, finally, there is Ambrose Weller, a darkly handsome Confederate soldier haunted by mysterious memories. What can heal him? Cowell’s therapies? Or Iris’ love?
A fine novel embroidered with rich imagery.Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-71207-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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