An engaging and effective romp rich with historical details.
In this second installment of a mystery series, a young woman navigates her future with her fiance and the unfriendly world of the upper class.
After a hasty engagement, Henrietta Von Harmon, a former usherette and taxi dancer in Depression-era Chicago, discovers that her intended, Clive Howard, isn’t just the dashing police inspector she thought he was. He also happens to be the scion of an elite family living on the wealthy North Shore of the city. Henrietta settles into the family’s estate, Highbury, only to struggle with the unspoken proprieties of the upper class and her disapproving future mother-in-law. As she befriends the servants, whom she feels much more at ease with, she quickly becomes embroiled in a minor intrigue: the Howards’ old cook loses a family ring and suspects the gardener of stealing it. Meanwhile, Clive works to solve a mystery of his own: a series of grisly murders in the city. While Henrietta’s delinquent younger brother acts out and her mother hides secrets about her past, the heroine and Clive grapple painfully with what their marriage would mean for each of their futures. Cox (A Girl Like You, 2016) successfully leads the reader through the suspenseful plot’s many unanswered questions and manages to keep the story moving even with her characters’ long introspective sessions. Those episodes imbue them with personality and life, though the author sometimes resorts to using incredibly long sentences to mimic internal monologue, which can become bewildering (“Henrietta had never seen anything like this, except perhaps in the movies, of which she had seen very few, actually, and she couldn’t pull her eyes away, so mesmerized was she, despite her new betrothed sitting beside her, his fedora hat placed firmly on his head and a pipe gripped loosely between his teeth”). The author adroitly uses indirect speech to present a cast of colorful personalities—the book switches effortlessly between voices as distinct as that of Mrs. Howard’s arch scheming and Henrietta’s sister Elsie’s naïve awe. The result is a complex yet engrossing web of interactions. And, as the story progresses, the connections between the threads tighten dramatically, culminating in a somewhat abrupt but nail-biting resolution.
An engaging and effective romp rich with historical details.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-196-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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