A fine tribute to a one-in-a-million character despite a few hard-to-swallow plot devices.
After becoming engaged to a Marine just before he ships off to the Middle East, Annie travels with her mother to England, where a mysterious crumbling estate and an aging aristocrat change her life.
Annie meets Eric in a bar and finds herself engaged to him within a month. He’s preparing to deploy, and she’s packing for a trip to Banbury, England, with her mother, Laurel, who has some oddly secretive business to take care of. Days pass while Laurel is locked in complicated negotiations, so Annie hangs out in a pub, reading a biography of the vibrantly eccentric Duchess of Marlborough—a real person worth a Google search—who had lived in Banbury. Annie and the book catch the attention of Gus, an older gentleman who frequents the pub and knew the Duchess (aka Gladys) years ago, when she lived in the village as a recluse. Gus shares stories of the duchess’s last years, and here the author blends fact with a story built around two fictional characters, the biographer and the duchess’s paid companion, both of whom helped her outwit family members who were trying to get their hands on her fortune. After Annie realizes the home where the Duchess lived is the same property her mother is trying to sell, some investigation reveals she has a more personal stake in the story than she imagined. Gable (A Paris Apartment, 2014) tells an engaging story of a fascinating, largely forgotten historical figure against the backdrop of two fledgling romances, those of Annie and her fiance, who grow closer through emails, and the biographer and the companion, whose romantic adventures went awry but may still be salvaged decades later. Blending fact and fiction in an entertaining but occasionally confusing way, the author offers a fascinating version of the reclusive years of the larger-than-life duchess. Many aspects of her life are hard to believe, yet it’s the fictional story that sometimes stretches the threshold of credibility. Characters try too hard to maintain big secrets that, once revealed, seem unworthy of such effort, especially given how easily some of the big conflicts could be eliminated with simple conversations.
A fine tribute to a one-in-a-million character despite a few hard-to-swallow plot devices.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07063-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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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