A well-crafted portrait of two famous artists, their suffering, and their joys.
Groen’s historical novel imagines a love affair between Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas.
In 1877, Mary “May” Cassatt is already making a name for herself in the French art scene, having had some paintings exhibited at the Salon, the establishment arbiter of the art world at the time. She is excited by the work of Edgar Degas, who has rebelled against the Salon and is a founder of the Impressionist movement. They finally meet, and she is enthralled. They become colleagues, then personal friends, and then, seemingly inevitably, lovers. Another strand in the story deals with Mary’s relationships with her family members. The Cassatts, from Philadelphia, are well-off, and her parents and older sister Lydia move to Paris to support Mary (and because they remember France so fondly). Mary is very close to Lydia, her faithful confidant, who lost her fiancé in the Civil War. Many famous real-life artists get cameo roles or mentions, showing Mary’s milieu, and Camille Pissarro gets more than that; as a happy husband and father, he contrasts with the tortured loner Degas, who can be incredibly hurtful. Camille becomes Mary’s other confidant; in fact, he warns her about Degas and is there for her when it all goes wrong. There is no hard historical evidence for this romance, and, of course, neither Mary nor Edgar ever married (this is not alternative history), but Groen is by no means the first to speculate. And Lydia at least did have a love tragically stolen from her. (At one point an exasperated Lydia says, “I wasn’t born with your talent…But I loved a man. I know what it’s like to wake up every morning longing for someone.”) What drives the book is the contrasting dynamics: love versus art, excitement versus serenity, the establishment versus the avant-garde. Love is strong, but is the pull of art stronger? That is the question. The text includes reproductions of artworks—mostly Cassatt’s—throughout.
A well-crafted portrait of two famous artists, their suffering, and their joys.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-685136598
Page Count: 251
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2025
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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