A shift of focus away from espionage and toward Jane Austen makes for a fun, fresh installment in a successful series.
In this seventh installment in the Regency romantic suspense series, Willig (The Betrayal of the Blood Lily, 2010, etc.) refreshes her formula for a lighthearted and sweet holiday romance.
It is Christmas, 1803, and the charming Arabella Dempsey is not looking forward to the holidays. The oldest daughter of an impoverished Bath parson, Arabella had been living in London with her well-to-do aunt. But not only has the aunt married a much younger officer—the Captain Musgrave, who had previously paid attention to Arabella—she has since made it clear that Arabella, after years of virtual servitude, will not inherit a fortune. Over her friend Jane Austen’s objections, Arabella takes a teaching job in a girl’s school, where she literally runs into the wealthy and handsome older brother of one of her charges, uncovering a spy plot involving encoded schoolbooks and a message wrapped rather stickily in a Christmas pudding. As the holidays begin, and Arabella’s attendance is required at one last function, both espionage and romance unfold, all under the knowing eyes of Arabella’s aspiring novelist friend. While Willig’s series has been distinguished by its Austen-like wit and historical accuracy, its gimmick of upperclass spies in the Napoleonic Wars had grown increasingly strained. In this holiday-themed volume, Willig smartly recharges the series by stepping back in time—the action of this installment takes place between the fourth and fifth books of the series. She also changes the usual setup by substituting a goodhearted but clumsy fool as her hero. Although many assume the foppish Reginald Fitzhugh is in fact the fabled spy, the Pink Carnation, in part because of his ornate floral waistcoats, the aptly nicknamed Turnip is exactly what he seems, a sweet klutz. But a gentlemanly klutz who can win the heart of Willig’s more intelligent heroine with his affable chivalry.
A shift of focus away from espionage and toward Jane Austen makes for a fun, fresh installment in a successful series.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-525-95187-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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