A decidedly clever and well-written flight of fancy starring a literary legend.
This epistolary novel explores whether F. Scott Fitzgerald really was recruited to assassinate Marshal Philippe Pétain in 1940.
Henri Duval is a double agent. His public persona is that of a functionary of the despicable Vichy government in France; in reality, he is working for the Resistance, which often gets him into embarrassing and dangerous situations. He is also supposed to be a Hollywood screenwriter, a guise that enables him to meet and befriend Fitzgerald, now pretty much washed up and rarely sober despite the anxious ministrations of his mistress, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. Eventually, Henri and Fitzgerald make it to Vichy and are granted an audience with Pétain, but it is no spoiler to say that the assassination is badly bungled (or readers surely would have heard about it). All the trappings are here: the serendipitous discovery of a locked trunk in an estate sale; the existence of silent confederate Hyman Skolski (the recipient of Henri’s fevered letters); the breaking of the code they devised; and the fact that Pétain is a big fan of Fitzgerald and the Roaring ’20s (who knew?). All this is framed with an introduction written by a distinguished Princeton historian who even provides footnotes from time to time. Because this witty novel is in a historical setting, Sinclair can, for example, have Henri stumble on the Marx brothers at their most manic (“I can’t make sense of them, but they’re very nice fellows. They enjoyed themselves immensely making fun of my heavy French accent”). Later, the double agent falls hard for a mysterious woman on the Santa Monica beach only to discover that she, too, is a famous, real-life Hollywood mistress. The author does a fine job with Fitzgerald: vain and impulsive, somehow both childish and childlike, and a real challenge for Henri to handle. Henri himself is a wonderful creation. From the first, he is disdainful of these Americans, especially the Los Angeles subspecies. A man can’t find decent food or wine here, he wails, and the vaunted movies are clichéd and trashy. But of course, he softens to the point that (Zut alors!) he is only bemused by, not contemptuous of, these Americans, though he stops short of becoming a baseball fan.
A decidedly clever and well-written flight of fancy starring a literary legend.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2023
ISBN: 979-8-9868261-0-3
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Eclectic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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
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