Unfortunately, Simons misses a good opportunity to present a strong romance and clearly connect its characters to many of...
A love story about two people from vastly different worlds gets off to an excruciatingly slow start in Simons’ prequel to The Bronze Horseman trilogy.
When Sicilian-born immigrants Gina and Salvo Attaviano arrive in Boston with their mother in 1899, the family meets a couple of 21-year-old entrepreneurs who provide food, lodging and advice before the Attavianos settle in with relatives in nearby Lawrence. The nephew of a Civil War hero, Ben Shaw is animated and passionate about bananas, his desire to build a canal in Panama to promote international trade and, once he sets eyes on her, 14-year-old Gina. Harry Barrington is the polar opposite of Ben. The son of a wealthy property owner, he’s quiet and bookish and has been dating Alice, the daughter of his father’s business partner, for years. When Ben invites Gina to attend anti-imperialistic meetings sponsored by his feminist mother, Gina sneaks to Boston each week—but it’s neither the politics nor Ben that interest her. She’s attracted to Harry and does everything in her power to spend time with him, including convincing Harry to invest in two restaurants. Although Harry’s increasingly drawn to Gina, he still tries to do as society dictates, and he and Gina eventually go their separate ways as Ben heads to Panama to work on the new canal. In the ensuing years, Harry pursues his doctorate while maintaining his relationship with Alice, but a chance meeting with Gina steers his life in a new direction. The two begin to attend speeches given by anarchist Emma Goldman, socialist Eugene Debs, and other political and social activists, and Harry starts to reassess his own thoughts and feelings; so much so, in fact, that random fragments of the protestors’ speeches run willy-nilly through Harry’s thoughts as his own life changes course.
Unfortunately, Simons misses a good opportunity to present a strong romance and clearly connect its characters to many of the prevalent issues in early-20th-century America; although the love story is adequate, the sociopolitical elements in the narrative are too random to be meaningful.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210323-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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