A gripping, well-limned picture of a time and a place that provide universal lessons.
In Tod’s historical novel, two young couples find love against the backdrop of the 1870 Siege of Paris and the short-lived Commune that followed.
Camille Noisette and Mariele de Crécy both belong to very comfortable upper-class families. Mariele is engaged to Camille’s brother Bertrand, and Camille will soon meet André Laborde, and love will follow. But all four must endure the Prussians’ siege of Paris, which will cause physical destruction, lost lives, and, most important, social upheaval, as the lower classes, reduced to starving or eating rats, become a powder keg that explodes in the Communard uprising. Mariele and her mother try too late to slip away from Paris, are captured by the Prussians, and barely make it back. Camille becomes a sort of spy against the Communard movement, leading a dangerous double life, and, when things heat up, she volunteers at a makeshift hospital while Mariele helps out at a makeshift day care. Tod is a very experienced historical novelist, and it shows: There are no missteps here. Historical novels by their nature provide history and history lessons. Napoleon III does not get off lightly for his adventurism, and the reader will most likely be in sympathy with the Communard cause: The upper classes—the older generation in particular—are portrayed as clueless and arrogant. Bertrand and André survive their military experience, and the couples’ futures seem secure. Tod is not only a good historian, but also an accomplished writer, capturing here the febrile atmosphere of a Paris about to be under siege, the vise tightening, the sense of security eroding: “The city felt different. Darker than usual and for the most part quieter, and yet at times a sense of forced gaiety that became almost manic bubbled up.” It is against this looming dread that Camille and Mariele will struggle and even grow as human beings.
A gripping, well-limned picture of a time and a place that provide universal lessons.Pub Date: March 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9919670-4-9
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Heath Street Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This tender, strange treatise on getting out from the “prefab structures” of a conventional life is quintessentially July.
A woman set to embark on a cross-country road trip instead drives to a nearby motel and becomes obsessed with a local man.
According to Harris, the husband of the narrator of July’s novel, everyone in life is either a Parker or a Driver. “Drivers,” Harris says, “are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring.” The narrator knows she’s a Parker, someone who needs “a discrete task that seems impossible, something…for which they might receive applause.” For the narrator, a “semi-famous” bisexual woman in her mid-40s living in Los Angeles, this task is her art; it’s only by haphazard chance that she’s fallen into a traditional straight marriage and motherhood. When the narrator needs to be in New York for work, she decides on a solo road trip as a way of forcing herself to be more of a metaphorical Driver. She makes it all of 30 minutes when, for reasons she doesn’t quite understand, she pulls over in Monrovia. After encountering a man who wipes her windows at a gas station and then chats with her at the local diner, she checks in to a motel, where she begins an all-consuming intimacy with him. For the first time in her life, she feels truly present. But she can only pretend to travel so long before she must go home and figure out how to live the rest of a life that she—that any woman in midlife—has no map for. July’s novel is a characteristically witty, startlingly intimate take on Dante’s “In the middle of life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood”—if the dark wood were the WebMD site for menopause and a cheap room at the Excelsior Motel.
This tender, strange treatise on getting out from the “prefab structures” of a conventional life is quintessentially July.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780593190265
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.
A time-toying spy romance that’s truly a thriller.
In the author’s note following the moving conclusion of her gripping, gleefully delicious debut novel, Bradley explains how she gathered historical facts about Lt. Graham Gore, a real-life Victorian naval officer and polar explorer, then “extrapolated a great deal” about him to come up with one of her main characters, a curly-haired, chain-smoking, devastatingly charming dreamboat who has been transported through time. Having also found inspiration in the sole extant daguerreotype of Gore, showing him to have been “a very attractive man,” Bradley wrote the earliest draft of the book for a cluster of friends who were similarly passionate about polar explorers. Her finished novel—taut, artfully unspooled, and vividly written—retains the kind of insouciant joy and intimacy you might expect from a book with those origins. It’s also breathtakingly sexy. The time-toggling plot focuses on the plight of a British civil servant who takes a high-paying job on a secret mission, working as a “bridge” to help time-traveling “expats” resettle in 21st-century London—and who falls hard for her charge, the aforementioned Commander Gore. Drama, intrigue, and romance ensue. And while this quasi-futuristic tale of time and tenderness never seems to take itself too seriously, it also offers a meaningful, nuanced perspective on the challenges we face, the choices we make, and the way we live and love today.
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781668045145
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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