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THE KING'S CURSE

Under Gregory’s spell, we keep hoping history won’t repeat itself.

In the sixth of Gregory’s Cousins' War series, the last Plantagenets wage a losing and mostly subterranean battle against the unscrupulous Tudor upstarts.

Lady Margaret Pole, the principal of this installment, is cousin to many Plantagenet heirs of the house of York, including Elizabeth (The White Princess, 2013), who married Henry VII, the Tudor conqueror, after he deposed their uncle, Richard III. Elizabeth and her mother, a reputed sorceress, called down a curse upon the Tudors: that they would be unable to produce a healthy male heir and their line would die out in three generations, ending with a virgin queen. As we all know, that came true. However, somehow Gregory manages to keep us in suspense as to what will befall her characters. Lady Margaret, married to a lowly knight as Henry VII punishes the Yorks, is named guardian to the Prince of Wales, Arthur, in his Welsh castle. Arthur is clearly in love with his new wife, the Spanish infanta, Katherine of Aragon. But was the marriage consummated? This question, to which only Arthur, Katherine and Margaret know the answer, will trigger the tumult that follows. In deference to Arthur’s dying wish, Katherine marries his younger brother, Henry. As king, Henry magnanimously restores the Yorks, including Margaret, to their former lands and titles: She is now Countess of Salisbury and the richest woman in England. But as previous volumes predicted, the wheel of fortune keeps turning, particularly when a loose cannon like Henry rules. Ominously, Buckingham, the most powerful York next to Margaret, is executed for allegedly mentioning the curse. Then Wolsey falls. As the juggernaut of Anne Boleyn threatens to upend the English court; destroy Queen Katherine and Henry’s sole legitimate heir, Princess Mary; cause countless executions; change a national religion and civilization as they knew it, Margaret and the Yorks soldier on. It would be a spoiler to recount what happens next although we already know.

Under Gregory’s spell, we keep hoping history won’t repeat itself.

Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-4516-2611-7

Page Count: 608

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: July 30, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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

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ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.

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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.

In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.

Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.

Pub Date: May 6, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014

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