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LEONORA IN THE MORNING LIGHT

A satisfying historical novel about love, art, and war.

A novel based on true events exploring the life, love, and work of surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington.

Set against the backdrop of World War II, the novel shifts among the perspectives of Leonora; Max Ernst, her lover and fellow surrealist; and Peggy Guggenheim, the art collector and socialite. Twenty-year-old Leonora has spent her entire life rebelling against her upper-class British upbringing. When she meets Max at a dinner party, their attraction is immediate and all-consuming. Twenty-six years her senior, he brings her into his circle of artists, which includes Pablo Picasso, Andre Breton, and Salvador Dalí. Their relationship turns her into “the sort of woman her father most feared she’d become—an unmarried artist.” In their home in France, the two live in bliss for a few years—painting, exploring nature, and making love—before the war tears them apart. Max, a German citizen marked as “degenerate," is put into an internment camp, then reaches out to Peggy for help escaping Europe. Peggy, who has been trying to save artists (and their artwork) from the Nazis, begins to fall in love with Max—a man she knows will never fully love her back. Carter’s lyrical and poetic prose often embodies the strange, unnerving qualities of surrealism: “Light had flashed through the marrow of her bones and she’d lain as if electrocuted, ignited, having flown beyond the margins of her skin.” Throughout the novel, Carter meditates beautifully on the unique difficulties of being a woman artist. Near the end, Leonora is looking at a Frida Kahlo painting when she has an anguished realization about Kahlo: “She hides nothing. To become the master, she has killed the muse. It is that simple.” No longer willing to be only a muse, Leonora comes into her own.

A satisfying historical novel about love, art, and war.

Pub Date: April 6, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-982120-51-1

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021

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THE WOMEN

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

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A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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

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