Historical fiction for the Barbara Cartland set.
A romantic take on the powerful medieval queen.
A central figure in the 12th-century wars between France and England, Eleanor, at 15, became Duchess of Aquitaine, a wealthy and independent French province coveted by both countries. While still a teenager, she married Louis VII, a religious zealot who kept her closely confined, and after years of conflict, she persuaded the Pope to annul her marriage. Within a year she married again, this time to the brutal English Henry II. Despite bearing him eight children, the two came to hate each other. As her children grew, she persuaded them to revolt against their father, who in turn imprisoned her for 17 years, though in the end she had the last laugh, serving as regent after his death while her son, Richard the Lionhearted, crusaded in the Holy Land. Historians are silent on Eleanor’s sex life, but Kaufman (Shield of Three Lions, 1983) well understands that romance requires romance and so she invents the great Baron Rancon of Aquitaine and recounts a secret, dangerous, and passionate affair, Eleanor’s only consistent joy during years of unhappiness. Kaufman is unarguably an expert on the period, but her tale is told at the level of, say, a Hollywood epic, whose historical characters behave like modern Americans except for the funny clothes. Heroine Eleanor is a fiery queen, dazzlingly beautiful yet as skilled in statecraft and horsemanship as any man. She’s also a feminist, outraged at the treatment of women in medieval Europe. Because Kaufman doesn’t re-create a world through the narrative, she is forced to stop the action periodically and have a character to deliver a lecture on, say, the structure of feudalism (“ . .. any child knows the system of homage and overlords. My father used to call it a pyramid with the king at the top . . . ”).
Historical fiction for the Barbara Cartland set.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60906-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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