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ELIZABETH I

Name: ELIZABETH I
Author: Margaret George
ISBN: 978-0-670-02253-3

by Margaret George ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2011

Historically sound, but without the sympathetic spark of the best historical fiction.

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Overly busy novel of life inside the Virgin Queen’s court—and mind.

Anyone who’s read history or seen Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 bloodfest Elizabeth, with Cate Blanchett in the title role, knows that the daughter of Henry VIII was no one to mess with. Indeed, as George’s novel opens, well into her reign, Queen Elizabeth is sternly interrogating “the three most powerful men in the realm,” one of whom, Sir Francis Walsingham, is famously not shy of doing in the various opponents to her rule, such as Mary, Queen of Scots. England, Elizabeth avers, is the bulwark of the Reformation against a resurgent Catholic Church—explains one of those three, in a flat, modern and wholly anachronistic way, “It’s religious, but it’s also political.” Indeed. A viper in the nest, Elizabeth’s cousin, the vivacious redhead Lettice Knollys, has reasons aplenty to oppose the queen on several counts, not least of them old-fashioned familial rivalry, and George’s novel traces their long dance of fate against the backdrop of Tudor hanky-panky and an inconvenient Spanish Armada, the former more daunting and certainly more entertaining than the latter, since the Spanish fleet is all too quickly smashed against the rocks of Ireland. George tells her tale from multiple points of view, sometimes confusingly, and her prose tends to be without affect—or, for that matter, zing. In the hands of a master of period language, a John Barth, say, this tangled tale would doubtless spring to life, but as it is it’s all rather clinical, with intonations such as “It is in the nature of truth to have enemies” to remind us that we’re in the midst of important events. The tale is also nicely bloody and byzantine, but it goes on much too long; Hilary Mantel packed a lot more punch into Wolf Hall (2009), and in a 100-odd pages less.

Historically sound, but without the sympathetic spark of the best historical fiction.

Pub Date: April 5, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-670-02253-3

Page Count: 688

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE CONFESSIONS OF YOUNG NERO
by Margaret George

- BOOK REVIEW
HELEN OF TROY
by Margaret George

- BOOK REVIEW
MARY, CALLED MAGDALENE
by Margaret George

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

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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

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Film Productions Halted Due to Coronavirus Worry

- SEEN & HEARD
‘The Nightingale’ Is Reese’s Book Club Pick

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Adaptation of ‘The Nightingale’ Coming in 2027

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THE OTHER BENNET SISTER

by Janice Hadlow ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 31, 2020

Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.

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Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.

Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.

Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.