Overlong and overwrought, though not without a certain veddy British charm.
A first US appearance for British Vincenzi. (Overlook will also be publishing two of her previous novels: Something Dangerous and Into Temptation.)
Celia, headstrong daughter of aristocratic Edwardian parents, makes the breakfast kippers spin in their silver chafing dish when she decides to marry . . . out of her class. The object of her affections is tall, blond, handsome Oliver Lytton, the offspring of a distinguished London publisher and a rather louche actress, long since decamped. Celia’s outraged father points out that the man can’t even ride a horse. Her practical mother adds that marriage is a business (but neglects to mention that she has been carrying on a clandestine affair for years with a friend of the family’s). But Celia must and will have her way, and so she and Oliver marry, with only the family and a few loyal servants in attendance. Not the lavish society wedding Lady Beckenham had hoped for, but there’s no time to waste—and Celia is delivered of Giles, a robust if ugly-looking infant, a mere six months after the ceremony. Yet there is trouble ahead, and ere long, a silver candlestick will be hurled at the nursery door. Celia is profoundly bored by the unchanging routine of motherhood, and she wants to work. Oliver demurs. “I want you to be in our home, taking care of our son, not out in the rough world of publishing.” Then a collection of Queen Victoria’s letters proves a temptation too powerful to resist, and Celia offers an utterly brilliant suggestion: Shall they publish a simultaneous biography? Lo, a dazzling career begins within the hallowed and fusty walls of Lyttons as our Celia swans it through the ensuing years of tremendous social upheaval, WWI, decorous infidelity with a sexy author, and other proliferating subplots too numerous to count. Studiously avoiding latent snobbery, Vincenzi rounds out this baggy saga with a few working-class characters, whose hearts are in the right place even if their aitches are not.
Overlong and overwrought, though not without a certain veddy British charm.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2003
ISBN: 1-58567-481-8
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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