A rare find for readers looking for a peculiar combination of historical rigor and libidinous energy.
A novel offers a dramatized account of a family’s extraordinary genealogical history.
Minnie Bublitz, born in Poznan, Poland, in the mid-19th century, quickly radiates precocious curiosity and disarming forthrightness. Naturally beautiful, she starts to magnetize the attention of men, and her parents begin to look, with scrupulous wariness, for a suitable match. An ambitious businessman, Fred Hartman, asks for permission to court her, but his more irresolute brother, Karl, a soldier in the army, brazenly pursues Minnie as well, much to her delight and Fred’s abject dismay. Karl manages to win Minnie’s affections, proposes to her, and a wedding date is set. Karl is late for the wedding, but Minnie and her guests assume that he’s left her stranded at the altar, and Fred gallantly offers to take her hand in marriage. Fred introduces an eager Minnie to the erotic aspects of matrimony, and she rhapsodically falls in both love and lust with the man. But, against her wishes, Fred moves to the United States with the intention of relocating the whole family there, including their three children. While Fred is away, Karl visits Minnie, and her once-simmering emotions for him quickly return. They make love, and she becomes pregnant with another child, a fact she eventually discloses to an anguished Fred. Minnie seems unstirred by her own infidelity: “I have loved Fred for the past nine years. I will always love him. I also love another man, a wonderful man who loves me. I must trust him to take care of my children if Fred won’t.” Minnie moves to the United States with her children to be with Fred, but her marriage never recovers from what he perceives as an unforgivable betrayal. In her third book, LaZebnik (The Atomic Sailor, 2014, etc.) draws upon considerable genealogical research to follow the arc of her family’s history until the Depression. The story is often mesmeric and charged with erotic electricity (“After sex, Minnie always felt at peace. She was happier, and so relaxed she felt like dancing naked in a palace ballroom”). While the writing is generally crisp, it remains frustratingly unclear what accounts for Minnie’s simmering brew of sexual appetite and moral libertinism. The story is a gripping one, though, and reads more like contemporary erotica than a family history.
A rare find for readers looking for a peculiar combination of historical rigor and libidinous energy.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5237-5397-0
Page Count: 396
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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