Despite the novel's faults, the period setting comes alive thanks to O’Connor’s lively prose and dialogue.
A late-19th-century music hall artiste dares to assail class boundaries in a novel based on a sensational court case.
Isabel “Belle” Bilton, daughter of a military officer and a frustrated actress, leaves the barracks town where she was raised to seek her fortune on the London stage. Theater buffs, hoping for an insider look at the antecedents of today’s musicals, be advised: There is very little backstage drama and even less about Belle’s day-to-day challenges as a singer, dancer, and actor. Billed as the Sisters Bilton, Belle and her sister Flo are an instantaneous hit—although O’Connor tells rather than shows readers that the sisters’ talent is not just skin-deep. Flo quickly settles for a safe but dull marriage, but Belle frequents bohemian nightspots like the Corinthian Club, where she succumbs to the blandishments of Alden Weston, a self-proclaimed baron, who is later convicted of fraud and imprisoned. Pregnant by Weston, Belle is helped by her only true friend, wealthy antiques merchant Isidore Wertheimer, who, as a gay Jewish man, inhabits a demimonde of another sort. After farming her infant out to a wet nurse, Belle soldiers on with her career. Her romantic zeal is reignited by William, an Irish viscount who takes up with her in defiance of his father, the Earl of Clancarty, who threatens to disinherit him. They marry in secret, but the Earl sends his son to Australia almost immediately thereafter. Isidore again shelters Belle as she anxiously awaits William’s return—only to hear that, despite the occasional fervid love letter, William has petitioned for divorce. The ensuing jury trial is the most compelling portion of the book, which has thus far languished without much of a plot. Belle’s characterization is anemic: Is she naïve? An opportunist? A gold digger? A slave to love and/or lust? Her emotions, traits, and intentions are duly cataloged, but Belle’s essence remains decorative and unknowable.
Despite the novel's faults, the period setting comes alive thanks to O’Connor’s lively prose and dialogue.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1440-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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