More reminiscent of Wilkie Collins than Jane Austen.
Second installment of Aidan’s trilogy retelling Pride and Prejudice from Darcy’s point of view.
While An Assembly Such as This (2006) closely followed Jane Austen’s original opening chapters, the plot here wanders a bit farther afield as Darcy carries on his fictional life away from the world of the Bennetts. When his friend Bingley decides to forgo his love for Elizabeth’s sister Jane, Darcy is relieved but not exactly happy. He still pines for Elizabeth, but only secretly and from a long distance; she never actually appears in this rendition. Darcy socializes in London and spends Christmas with his beloved younger sister Georgiana, who has recovered from her infatuation with the evil Wickham and committed herself to charity. She challenges Darcy’s innate snobbery when she does the unthinkable and actually visits the poor in their homes. The bulk of the story, however, revolves around a country-house party Darcy attends in hopes of forgetting Elizabeth by finding a wife within his own social caste. The host, Lord Sayre, is a former Cambridge classmate, as are most of the other male guests. But Darcy soon realizes that the gentlemen are all bad-tempered fools, the ladies all desperately conniving to find husbands or lovers. Their petty intrigues take an ominous turn when the one genuinely innocent houseguest discovers a bloody piglet dressed up as a murdered human infant. Darcy is powerfully attracted to the bewitching charms of Lord Sayre’s Irish half-sister, but she and her old servant prove to have dark secrets of their own. This sort of revisionism definitely has a readership, but Aidan’s authorial arrogance and excessive reliance on research are evident in that she requires multiple installments to cover events that her predecessor nailed so deftly in a single volume.
More reminiscent of Wilkie Collins than Jane Austen.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-9136-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
