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
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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