A historical novel that connects some dots but not all.
Kate’s adult fiction debut explores the intriguing world of Venetian orphanages that teach music to children.
Violetta and Mino are foundlings entrusted to the Ospedale degli Incurabili, originally a convent-run hospital for syphilitics. Violetta does not know who her parents are, but when she was 5, she witnessed Mino’s abandonment by his mother. Now teenagers who have met sporadically and secretly on the Ospedale’s roof, each must follow the destiny preordained by their social status in the arcane caste system of 1730s Venice. Violetta is training to join the Ospedale’s coro, the all-female ensemble that performs liturgical music to raise funds for the church. The prospects of less talented orphan girls are limited to arranged marriage, the convent, or menial servitude. As a boy, Mino is not allowed to study music, although he is gifted and has surreptitiously taught himself to play the violin. (He is also a self-taught luthier.) Male orphans like Mino are apprenticed when they age out. Kate (Unforgiven, 2015, etc.) does not stray far from the young adult staples of angst-y teens and conflicted love. Rejected by Violetta, Mino opts for Venetian street hustles in lieu of apprenticeship. Violetta is torn between the coro and the lure of professional singing, between Mino and a dashing older impresario who can make her a star. The contradictions posed by Venetian culture vis-à-vis the arts and morality are well-depicted: Coro musicians are revered, but their lives are constrained; professional musicians are viewed with contempt, and, with few exceptions, their performances are illegal. Strict moral codes ostensibly govern Venice, but the custom of wearing masks most of the year encourages all manner of anonymous vice and licentiousness, which then feeds the Ospedale system with more STD patients and abandoned, illegitimate progeny. Violetta and Mino, though, seem thinly motivated. Lacking clearly defined goals, each too often seems attracted by the latest shiny object.
A historical novel that connects some dots but not all.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1257-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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