Smart, fierce, lovely, and intricate.
A crusading Gilded Age journalist makes a soul connection with a jeweler, who unwittingly helps her leverage the mystique of the Hope Diamond as she fights for justice.
New York heiress Vera Garland has a secret: She’s also the popular female journalist Vee Swann, a secret identity she maintains through a no-nonsense disguise and backstory that depends on her living in a significantly less upscale part of town than her family. She feels it’s necessary to stay in touch with the stories of the day, especially those that deal with tenements, immigrants, and the struggles of the less privileged, including working women. Her mother disapproves of her work, so Vera depends on the love and approval of her father, Granville Garland, owner of a Fifth Avenue emporium. Going undercover in a tenement, Vee befriends a young neighbor, but when the girl falls ill and Vee offers to pay for a doctor, the child’s drunk, enraged father throws her down a stairway. Severely injured and emotionally wounded by the child’s death, Vera moves into the beautiful Tiffany-designed penthouse apartment above her father's store. She is just beginning to feel herself again when her father dies from a heart attack. Vera inherits the apartment and, in clearing out his things, discovers a letter that makes her realize her father had deep secrets, including a love affair with a man that predated his marriage. She suspects he died of a broken heart since his lover committed suicide to protect them both from a blackmailer. Meanwhile, the Hope Diamond has come to New York, residing in Cartier’s Fifth Avenue shop. Vera suspects Cartier is playing up the jewel's dramatic history to try to increase its value. She effects an accidental meeting with Jacob Asher, an enigmatic jeweler whose renowned family was decimated in the Russian pogroms and who now works with Cartier. When the two become close, she blurs the lines between her professional and personal lives, gaining information from their relationship that reflects badly on Cartier in order to expose her father's extortionist. When justice is served, however, Vera must decide what she’s willing to fight for in her personal life. Rose’s newest title is complex and compelling, with many threads of history, plot, and character that weave together into a bold, satisfying tapestry. Along the way, she touches on issues society still faces: power, privilege, anti-Semitism, women’s sexual, social, and professional rights, and the never-ending struggle for tolerance and equality.
Smart, fierce, lovely, and intricate.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7363-9
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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