A promising start to a family saga about ordinary people.
The inaugural volume of Gregory’s (Dark Tracks, 2018, etc.) new series is set during the English civil war.
A wise woman is at the center of this launch. Alinor, an herbalist and midwife, is reminiscent of Jacquetta (The Lady of the Rivers, 2011), another Gregory protagonist, foundress of the Woodville dynasty of beautiful and resourceful women who figure in the War of the Roses and attract accusations of witchcraft. In 1648, the risk of such accusations is even higher, since Alinor lacks Jacquetta’s noble lineage and because an army of Puritan Christians led by Oliver Cromwell has dethroned King Charles, now confined on the Isle of Wight. Extensive atmospherics slow the action but convey a strong sense of place—the Sussex tidelands, where, on Sealsea Island, Alinor earns a sparse living selling herbs and practicing the healing arts. She also invites scrutiny because her abusive husband disappeared months before. Detail abounds about the 17th-century economy of a small island: The local lord, Sir William, still holds sway thanks to a deal with Parliament, and his tenants each have their trade. Alinor’s brother Ned, a staunch anti-royalist, runs the family ferry business, her daughter Alys, also beautiful, works for the miserly Mrs. Miller, whose family controls the tide-driven mill. Everyone makes their own ale. When Alinor meets James, a disguised Catholic priest who has been summoned by Sir William, her fortunes change for both good and ill. James, a spy from the exiled English court in France, is embroiled in a plot to rescue King Charles. With James’ help, Alinor’s son Rob is assured of a brighter future under Sir William’s patronage. Alinor and the handsome James are instantly drawn to one another, and his vow of chastity falls to the wayside, with rather unpleasant results once he is called back to France. There are chilling descriptions of what Puritans in power are prepared to do to women who deviate from social norms—or merely incite envy. Once the jeopardy accelerates, this is Gregory par excellence.
A promising start to a family saga about ordinary people.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8715-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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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