A workplace drama that often feels too much like work.
A revered skin care doyenne battles a private equity turnaround team in Vincenzi’s latest (More Than You Know, 2012, etc.).
Athina Farrell founded the House of Farrell cosmetics firm with her handsome husband, Cornelius, in 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Now, as the queen’s diamond jubilee approaches, the venture capitalists who have taken over Farrell’s have installed Bianca, a high-powered turnaround artist, as CEO, charged with the Sisyphean task of revitalizing the near-bankrupt firm. Athina, now 85 and widowed, had no choice but to allow the buyout, but having negotiated 51 percent of the stock for herself and her two children, Bertram and Caroline, she hopes the family can retain control of the company. Since her superannuated lawyers didn’t build voting rights into the mix, this may be more of a challenge than Athina anticipated, but she has an ace up her well-tailored sleeve: a recipe for a blockbuster perfume. As is typical with Vincenzi’s novels, this premise brings together myriad characters (the Character List at the beginning is indispensable) and subplots. Bianca, who has depended on her staid banker husband, Patrick, to do the heavy domestic lifting as she toils 24/7, has her world upended when he enters the all-consuming field of hedge fund analysis. With both parents thus preoccupied, preteen daughter Milly endures vicious bullying at private school; her anguish is noticed but not addressed. Florence, a longtime Farrell’s retainer who manages a tiny but opulent store frequented by London’s glitterati, has a secret: she and Cornelius carried on an affair for years. Why did Athina withhold her perfume formula for decades? All part of the matriarch’s plan to sabotage the CEO, Bianca thinks. After about 400 pages, the multiple plotlines begin to pay off. While many readers may find this fictionalized case history of a company in crisis absorbing, others, particularly those seeking an escape from long-winded meetings and office politics, may not.
A workplace drama that often feels too much like work.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1091-7
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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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