A magnificent book. A true masterpiece of both substance and style.
A woman is hounded by accusations of witchcraft through 16th-century Denmark in this historically based novella.
“I am a child shaped in beeswax,” is how the narrator of this breathtaking short novel introduces itself. The narrator means this literally—it is a wax child, only “the size of a human forearm.” Its beloved maker, who it misses with a “bottomless, shaft-like longing,” is an impoverished Danish noblewoman named Christenze Kruckow, who lives in the luckless household of Anne Bille. Embittered by an unbelievable series of miscarriages or stillbirths, Anne accuses Christenze of witchcraft, the punishment for which is a gruesome death. Christenze flees to the larger town of Aalborg, taking the wax child with her. In Aalborg, Christenze, who never married, joins a lively society of women who gossip, sing, and repeat the folk lessons they have learned from their mothers as they perform the grueling labor of their lives. The wax child, who is present at many of these gatherings in the guise of a child’s toy, reports both the women’s talk and the feelings that seethe behind it—Christenze’s attraction to the “effervescent” Maren; the claustrophobic resentment of foolish Elisabeth, whose husband, the pastor Klyne, abuses her; the proud independence of the one-eyed widow Dorte; the cunning spirit of Apelone. Yet, in spite of the small protection afforded by her noble birth, the label of “witch” is not so quick to fall away from a woman content to live on her own. Spurred by the witch-hunting mania of King Christian IV and fanned by accusations from the malignant Klyne, Christenze is again accused of witchcraft and is thrown into the dungeons, along with Maren, Dorte, and Apelone, to await trial. Throughout it all, the wax child—who narrates from the distant future, the past, and the brutal present of the novella all at once—spins its own spellbinding tale of loss and longing as the true story of Christenze Kruckow weaves through language that makes what happened to her, and to so many other women like her, pulse with a clarity more real than fact.
A magnificent book. A true masterpiece of both substance and style.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780811238830
Page Count: 144
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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