Enough sumptuous prose poetry to sate the most demanding palate, though some readers will feel restless long before the...
An ambitious fantasy on situations and themes from The English Patient, transplanted to 1809 New York, yields mixed results.
As the Napoleonic Wars cast their shadow over the young country in the form of an inconvenient trade embargo with nearby Canada and renewed Indian unrest provoked by white men’s quarrels, John Frayne returns to the town of New Forge to reclaim the property his father forfeited when he would not take a loyalty oath. Purchasing the right to feed and clothe a pair of indigents, an elderly family friend and a young mute woman first glimpsed pushing the body of her mother into a hole in the frozen lake, Frayne moves into Bay House and sets about making a family. But families are hard for Frayne, who left his first wife, Hester, when she took a lover, and survived a second wife, Tacha, whom he took while living among the Indians. And tensions mount when he finds Hester still involved with the same man, and their son Tim, ten, full of hate for the father who aches to reclaim him. Instead, Frayne devotes himself to Jennet, the mysterious outcast he has taken in, a woman as damaged as he is. As love blooms between them, Lawrence (The Burning Bride, 1998, etc.) cuts away repeatedly to focus on Frayne’s landlord and enemy, scheming shopkeeper Herod Aldrich, who dreams of unlimited wealth and power, and crippled furniture maker Marius Leclerc, who dreams only of shaking off the nightmarish miracle of his surviving Austerlitz. After a glacially slow beginning, Lawrence goes back to the well of memory to dredge up secret after damning secret about the characters. But she’s no Michael Ondaatje, and her melodramatic climax provides more relief than fulfillment.
Enough sumptuous prose poetry to sate the most demanding palate, though some readers will feel restless long before the seventh course arrives.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-380-97621-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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