An entertaining historical novel about a complicated figure.
Marmorstein offers a fictionalized account of the life of 16th-century naval admiral and Genoese politician Andrea Doria.
The author anchors this story to a single night late in Doria’s life, when it nearly ended. On Jan. 2, 1547, octogenarian Doria, an influential political leader in the Italian Republic of Genoa in Italy, regales his family and holiday visitors with adventure tales. He recounts his rise to military fame and his alliances with kings and popes. He boasts of how, as the defender of Genoa, he initially worked with the French and ultimately with the Spanish when, in 1528, Spanish King Charles V offered the city both protection and independence. Doria announced the agreement to an adoring city, but he refused to be named the doge of the republic. Unofficially, however, he’d ruled the city ever since. Gian Luigi Fieschi, a supposed friend, is present for these stories but then leaves Doria’s villa to start a rebellion he had been planning for months. Marmorstein ingeniously uses a storytelling framework to tell a vivid tale of Doria’s life and times; he does not, however, simply provide a hagiography, as his use of the omniscient voice allows for other perspectives, including some that contradict Doria’s. The author also enlivens the holiday gathering with sumptuous descriptions of the wines, foods such as canestrelli cookies, and the lush furnishings of the Doria villa. He weaves an enjoyable tale, but one wonders how it fits into the Mentoris Project series, which aims to provide novels about important historical figures who can inspire readers to “make a positive contribution to society.” Doria helped free Genoa from French rule but was hardly a man to emulate; he enslaved captives, abandoned towns to enemies, and ruthlessly controlled his city for more than three decades.
An entertaining historical novel about a complicated figure.Pub Date: July 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-947431-38-6
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Mentoris Project
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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