Middlebrow and breezy. A perfect beach read, if a touch off-season, unless you’re headed for Casablanca and its waters.
“You wore blue. The Germans wore gray.” So quoth Humphrey Bogart’s character in Casablanca, the tutelary spirit behind bestselling Spanish debut novelist Dueñas’ high-minded historical soap.
Rick Blaine was a soldier of fortune and a failed romantic. Sira Quiroga is a seamstress of fortune, a young woman who has just barely come of age when Franco and his fascist pals start mucking about in the roiled politics of 1930s Spain. Those who remember their history will recall that the generalissimo began his revolt across the waters in Morocco, then under Spanish rule, a place to which Sira has been swept by a dashing but ultimately dastardly lover, who maroons her in the land of the Moors without a centavo. But Sira is a woman of resources, and from the shadowy depths of the Casbah she works herself up into high society, like Larissa Antipova’s mom in Doctor Zhivago. Couturier and designer to the jet set—or perhaps better the Stuka set, given the era—Sira is well placed to hear the secrets of the fascists and their Nazi pals, learning along the way what she has always known—that no one is to be trusted, especially if they look and act like that man in the Dos Equis beer commercial. All is Horatio Alger with a lace mantilla until Sira starts getting wrapped up in the gossipy politics of the day, delivered with rhetorical flourishes worthy of Bizet: “They say Franco’s delighted with him because he’s endlessly recruiting warlike Moorish boys to him, to send to the front...He didn’t spend his whole life playing cards like the laid-back Colonel Sáenz de Buruaga, who on the day of the uprising even gave the first orders from the casino terrace.” Very well, then: Such a worthy adversary requires worthy derring-do, and Sira, now hooked up with British intelligence—for by now we’ve gone from gothic romance to espionage thriller—is just the person for the gig. Will Beigbeder, Franco and Uncle Adolf prevail, or will the good triumph? Well, you’ll just have to read Dueñas’ well-crafted but decidedly chick-lit effort to find out.
Middlebrow and breezy. A perfect beach read, if a touch off-season, unless you’re headed for Casablanca and its waters.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1688-0
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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