Not a lot of action, but in Bayard’s skilled hands, three complicated people groping toward a new phase in their lives is...
Historical thriller veteran Bayard (Lucky Strikes, 2016, etc.) finds suspense in the three-cornered relationship of Mary Todd, her awkward but compelling suitor, Abraham Lincoln, and his closest companion, debonair Joshua Speed.
About to turn 21 when she arrives in Springfield in 1839, Mary teeters on the brink of old-maidenhood. She’s too sharp-tongued and politically astute for the town’s eligible men—including, she thinks regretfully, handsome merchant Joshua Speed, whom she initially finds more charming than his friend Lincoln, who is as tongue-tied with ladies as he is plainspokenly eloquent at the Illinois statehouse. But Mary becomes intrigued by Lincoln, a rising Whig politician who finds a woman with brains and savvy enticing rather than off-putting. She doesn’t yet realize how destabilizing their budding romance is for Lincoln and Speed. For two years the men have shared a room and a bed, not in itself unusual for 19th-century bachelors, but as Lincoln hungrily learned the ways of polite society from his new friend, a deeper intimacy developed. By the time Mary appears, Lincoln and Speed, each profoundly lonely for his own reasons, share an unusually intense bond apparent to all. Alternating between Mary’s and Joshua’s points of view, Bayard chronicles the bumpy progression of the Lincoln-Todd courtship, its painful blow-up, and Lincoln’s subsequent collapse into crippling depression. There are no villains in this acute and compassionate portrait: When Speed warns Lincoln that Mary “will drain [you] dry,” we can see there’s some truth in this statement but even more truth in Lincoln’s retort, “Is it this girl you object to? Or is it any girl?” The author commendably refrains from imposing 21st-century sexual mores on the Lincoln-Speed relationship, profoundly loving but not physical in Bayard’s depiction. Mary Todd, by contrast, gets a welcome contemporary reappraisal as a woman of spirit and will, not the needy hysteric painted by traditional historians.
Not a lot of action, but in Bayard’s skilled hands, three complicated people groping toward a new phase in their lives is all the plot you need.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-847-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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