Be prepared to hold tight as you're boosted into the cockpit for a two-day flight across the horizon. The odds of making it...
Three daring and determined women, inspired by Charles Lindbergh’s flight, take to the skies in a risky race to be the first woman to make the dangerous trans-Atlantic flight.
It's 1927. There is danger in the skies above the Atlantic—fierce winds, driving rain, lightning, and temperatures so cold that ice builds up on the wings of airplanes, dragging them out of the sky to the churning sea below. Lindbergh has made his historic flight to great acclaim; Amelia Earhart has yet to make hers. But for English heiress Elsie Mackay, wealthy society widow Mabel Boll, and Ruth Elder, a young beauty pageant winner from Alabama, the thrill of being the first woman to cross the Atlantic in the air is deemed worth risking their lives for. Notaro (The Potty Mouth at the Table, 2013, etc.) breaks from her self-deprecating comedic style to enliven a year when trans-Atlantic air travel was in its daring infancy, bringing to life these three real-life women from the pages of aviation history. In a decade of transition (women voting, hemlines rising, roles changing), there are still people who disapprove of women who want to be more than a traditional wife and mother. Not that that mattered one whit to Mackay, Boll, or Elder, as they battled family, friends, financial constraints, and most of all the weather while preparing for their life-or-death flights. Notaro portrays this exciting sliver of time with historical accuracy, providing an authentic glimpse of the era (including photographs), and then adds a pump of adrenaline by including dialogue and drama of her own imagination, creating a captivating historical fiction.
Be prepared to hold tight as you're boosted into the cockpit for a two-day flight across the horizon. The odds of making it are against you—but what a ride!Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 9781451659405
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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
PROFILES
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
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