A novel weaves the tale of a centuries-old mystery and an unsuspecting young woman who may be the key to solving it.
This story centers on a 20-something woman named Isa, who’s living a carefree, partying life in Paris when she’s summoned by her mother, Victoria, who has news too momentous to be shared over the phone. And she isn’t exaggerating: in the novel’s earliest pages, she reveals that she’s not actually Isa’s mother: her sister Mara is—and there’s more. Mara has just recently awoken from the coma she’s been in for two decades but is still very weak, and Victoria thinks mother and daughter should meet before it’s too late. The author adroitly positions these present-day episodes with a series of scenes set in increasingly remote periods of the past. Readers meet a younger version of Mara, working in a lonely museum in Transylvania, plagued by her remembrance of the events surrounding the disappearance of her father, a renowned archaeologist, memories that hint at a stunning secret discovery he’d made. And parallel scenes unfold in 1389 Tuscany and involve a bishop named Giovanni de’ Marignolli, who seems to be two-thirds fraud and one-third amnesiac. The action of the main plot kicks into gear when Isa is attacked by a mysterious assailant in her mother’s hospital. The intervention of an affable stranger named Mark Zweifer saves Isa, and the two proceed to try to solve the puzzle of what secret from Mara’s past would prompt a hired killer to take an interest in anything she might have to say upon awakening from her coma. Mark and Isa’s quest uncovers a vivid, twisting tale of Renaissance treachery, tarot cards, and a potentially explosive historical revelation. Nedelea’s fiction debut approaches this familiar The Da Vinci Code pattern with great scene-setting vigor, a natural-feeling grasp of dramatic pacing, and some fractious chemistry between Isa and Mark that’s no less entertaining for being intensely predictable. At one point, Isa asks him: “Are you really a weirdo, or are you just pretending to be one?” The well-orchestrated climax pulls together all the various plotlines with an enjoyable degree of flair.
A complex, engrossing archaeological thriller with a plot stretching over many eras.
Pub Date: May 21, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 409
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2016
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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