A gorgeous mystery of love that twists into curses.
One hundred years after her death, Emma Rose Finnis still haunts Lambry House, nestled along the harsh coast of northern California. When the last of the Lambrys dies however, Emma must match wits with a ghost hunter who's come to cleanse the estate of her spirit.
Dressler (The Deadwood Beetle, 2001, etc.) conjures a bewitching seacoast village swathed in fog and rimmed by fierce, cold, crashing waves. It’s a strange parallel world in which ghost hunters have rid most towns of all ghosts, revenants unconvinced of their own deaths. Clever and careful, Emma has avoided complete obliteration from the hunters’ strange weapons, yet the arrival of the Danes, who hope to renovate the historic estate, provokes her. Able to manipulate the physical world, Emma locks them in a pantry, bewilders them into thinking they're drowning, and then kicks them roughly into the hallway. The realtor, Ellen, is astonished when, instead of fleeing the premises, Mr. Dane immediately signs a contract for the house, vowing to rid the place of its ghost. Pratt, the hunter, is a cruelly calculating man, but Emma may well prove his match. Dressler’s tale compellingly shifts and slips between Emma’s long-buried life story and her increasingly eerie cat-and-mouse game with Pratt. A century ago, riven with loss—of her mother to childbirth, of her father to a horrific shipping accident—Emma gamely accepts Mrs. Augustus Lambry’s lucrative offer to work for the new family up at the lighthouse, an offer she knows is intended to keep her awayfrom Quint, the family's eldest son. Mrs. Lambry's ploy, however, sets into motion a series of disasters. Quint, utterly besotted, follows Emma to her new post, but his parents’ opposition frustrates him. Meanwhile the lighthouse keeper has noticed Emma’s beauty. As the veil lifts on Emma’s star-crossed fate, more secrets come to light, and Pratt’s relentless pursuit coils into dangerous waters.
A gorgeous mystery of love that twists into curses.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-2067-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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
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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