Nevertheless, a vividly imagined story that keeps nagging away at the corners of your mind. The Looking Glass is well worth...
With wry wit and understated compassion, French-British author Roberts (Impossible Saints, 1998, etc.) studies the ironies of loving—and of truly knowing the hearts and minds of those whom one loves.
Roberts’s flavorful new novel consists of two stories related sequentially, though otherwise more or less discrete. The first is orphaned Geneviève Délange’s narrative of her early years in a home run by stern, unloving nuns, the refuge she found in hearing and thereafter inventing stories (the most formative of them is a fable about a mermaid attempting to live outside her element), and her brief happiness in the employ of an indulgent mistress—until the latter’s coarse new husband compromises the servant girl, and Geneviève is sent packing. Thereafter, the novel is divided into several first-person narratives, juxtaposing Geneviève’s account of her new life in the home of amorous bachelor poet Gérard Colbert, with the stories told about him by Gérard’s domineering mother, his young niece Marie-Louise, her English governess Millicent, and Gérard’s out-of-town married mistress Isabelle. All these women are to one degree or another infatuated, if not deeply involved with, the taciturn (though, one presumes, smoldering) Master of the House—and Roberts’s tricky structure suggests a series of mirrors in which these females observe themselves falling under his spell. Comparisons to Jane Eyre are doubtless inevitable, though the Gothic momentum that animates Bronte’s romantic masterpiece is largely missing here, because Roberts seems determined to give each of her women sufficient space in which to reveal the secrets of her heart. This jars against the reader’s compelling interest in Geneviève, whose complex relationships with all the Colberts and rueful sense of her own lowly place (“Sooner or later the mermaid had to return to the sea, which was her only true home”) ought, one feels, to have received higher narrative and thematic priority.
Nevertheless, a vividly imagined story that keeps nagging away at the corners of your mind. The Looking Glass is well worth peering into.Pub Date: July 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6700-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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