A first outing by Yale critic Brooks (Reading for the Plot, 1984, etc.) carries us across many years, several oceans, and countless worlds into the Arcadia of 18th-century Tahiti. In France during the last days of the ancien rÇgime, advancement in the world of politics and fashion had to be plotted as carefully as any military campaign. It helped immensely to possess a title, but that was no guarantee of success, as the young Prince Charles of Nassau-Siegen discovers to his chagrin. Noble but penniless, Charles has the good fortune to become the lover of the powerful Comtesse de Lesdiguieres, only to incur her wrath by taking as his mistress the beautiful (but plebeian) actress Mademoiselle Arnould. So much for his life at Court. Charles has to find his fortune abroad now, so he volunteers as an officer aboard the Boudeuse, which is just setting sail for an expedition to the South Seas. “While my story is of an immense voyage,” he says, “this is not a tale of the sea.” Quite right, too: It’s a tale of Tahiti and what’s to be found there. After enduring the hardships of life at sea and witnessing the brutality of the South American colonies, none of the crew is prepared for the beauty and innocence of the Polynesian isles. Arriving in 1769, they—re the first white men to set foot on Tahiti, a land of such natural abundance that agriculture is unknown and labor practically nonexistent. Even more wonderful are the Tahitian women, so finely featured and elegant that they seem scarcely human. Charles himself soon falls in love with the beautiful Ite, but his sojourn is cut short when the Boudeuse has to go back to France. He then faces the dilemma of returning to the gray land of Europe without Ite or remaining forever in an alien paradise. Engaging, well-paced, and intelligently written. The story itself is very old hat, but the spirit is there in full force. Don—t leave, Charles!
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85333-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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