Only race car aficionados may be willing to wade through the philosophic pretensions and flat prose.
A journalist specializing in auto design, Champa debuts with a novel about a classic car and the symbolism it holds for a range of characters.
Thirty-something Beth Corvid was originally hired to be the archivist of a photography collection owned by Emerson Tang, a half-Chinese/half-WASP multimillionaire. Only a few years older than Beth, Emerson is now dying of a never named incurable disease, and while there is no romance between them, there is love and devotion, so Emerson has put her in charge of his health care and his life in general. When the aging French artist Hélène Moreau, famous for her futurist “Speed” paintings created by race car tires during the 1950s, approaches Emerson to buy his 1954 Beacon, Beth is surprised to find out he has purchased the car without her knowledge. Hélène wants the car, or specifically its engine, to jump-start her creativity, which has dissipated. Hélène befriends Beth, but Beth doesn’t trust her motives or her sincerity. When it becomes clear that the chassis to Emerson’s Beacon is missing its original engine, Emerson suspects Hélene. He sends Beth to search for clues to its whereabouts in Germany, where the Beacon line is about to be relaunched. There, she meets Hélène’s former lover with whom she once raced in the Beacon. She also meets Miguel Beacon, whose grandfather founded the original Beacon manufacturing company. Miguel agrees to help her find the engine. Soon, the four characters' lives are intersecting if not intertwining as the search for the engine moves to California. Meanwhile, Emerson’s health is breaking down rapidly, and Beth, whose own near-death experience as a small child has left her afraid to commit fully to life, is finding herself increasingly attracted to Miguel. By the ending, in which a host of coincidences explain the convoluted plot, each of the characters has realized what the car represents in his/her life.
Only race car aficionados may be willing to wade through the philosophic pretensions and flat prose.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-79278-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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