History buffs fascinated by the wealth of historical information Lizzie unearths will forgive the long wait for the mystery...
A professor’s dream assignment turns up some disturbing details.
Lizzie Manning (Paradise Walk, 2011, etc.) has been assigned to arrange the centennial exhibition for St. Patrick’s College. The college’s founder was a wealthy Boston Irishman whose daughter, Maggie Kelliher, married Lorenzo Gonzaga, an Italian prince whose family has amassed a fantastic collection of everything from world-class art to stuffed alligators, much of it dating back to the Renaissance. When the family offers St. Patrick’s whatever items they want from the family home in Bologna, Lizzie researches the college’s collection of family papers and travels to Italy to make her choices. The only inhabitant of the house is the last of Maggie’s children, the mentally unstable Patrizio, who segues from welcoming Lizzie to attacking her. His nephew Cosimo, who’s financing the exhibit, has Patrick removed to a hospital, giving Lizzie the run of the house. With the help of the conservator Cosimo has hired to preserve, pack and ship the pieces, Lizzie soon makes difficult choices among the thousands of available items. But unexpected complications await her. While she’s working, Lizzie reads Maggie’s letters to her brother in Boston, which reveal much about the family’s struggles during World War II, when the Nazis raped and murdered Maggie’s daughter, a resistance fighter. When one of Lizzie’s first choices, a mummy case sans mummy, is mistakenly sent along with the mummy included, it turns out to contain the body of a young woman shot in the head and mummified in modern times. Lizzie must solve this murder before all her hard work is ruined.
History buffs fascinated by the wealth of historical information Lizzie unearths will forgive the long wait for the mystery to appear.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-935248-42-2
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Leapfrog
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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