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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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