Psychiatrist and law professor Blinder debuts with the tale of Warren Harding’s last decade or so—often in the voice of Nan Britton, a young, devoted, beloved mistress. Handsome, generous, empty-headed, and well-liked, Harding is a 46-year-old newspaper publisher and city politician in Marion, Ohio, when local 15-year-old Nan Britton first falls in love with him and worships him from afar. The year is 1912, and it isn—t long before the modest Harding is reluctantly drawn into a successful race for the Senate, urged on by the clique of —friends— who will later (as in the Tea Pot Dome scandal) taint his administration hopelessly with corruption. The adoring Nan follows him to Washington, where he takes her under his wing, finds her an apartment, watches out for her: only with a rather touching gradualness (the First Lady, suffering eternally from unspecified maladies, is ambitious but profoundly sexless) do the two become lovers. Once Harding is in the White House (having been nominated by a —fluke— during a deadlocked Republican convention) and finds how lonely life is, he turns even more passionately to Nan, who in turn supports him all she can as he tries to grow with the job, educating himself ruthlessly and evolving, surprise of surprises, into more and more of a liberal. His self- serving advisors and cabinet, however, eat away from within at all he tries to accomplish, and the rigor and disappointment of the presidency exacerbate the heart disease (first noticed during lovemaking with the pregnant-to-be Nan) that will bring his death during a nation-wide tour to rally support—with wild success—for his causes, among them world peace and racial equality. Blinder is no towering lyricist, but he’s a spellbinding novel-writer whose timing, it must be said in this National Moment of Monica, is remarkable—as are his efforts to catch every bit of period speech and detail that happens by. An easy, pleasurable debut crying out movie, movie, movie.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57962-017-5
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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
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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