Robyn winds up making history instead of movies, and RGyR’s time-travelers will be all the happier for it.
This historical fantasist has taken readers to the spirit world of Native Americans to Atlantis in the Bronze Age to Mesozoic dinosaurs (The Moon Maid: and Other Fantastic Adventures, 1998), and to witchcraft in 16th-century Scotland (The Spiral Dance, 1991). Now. . . .
Robyn Stafford, a young California studio executive, has been on a hiking trip along the Welsh border, largely to forget that Collin, the Englishman visiting Hollywood who became her lover from Sotheby’s, has turned out to be married—and his wife was giving the birthday party Robyn crashed. Alone on the border trail amid glorious scenery, she finds herself facing a knight in mud-spattered chain mail who calls himself Edward Plantagenet, Earl of March, and, falling in with this handsome prince, Robyn is whisked back into the War of the Roses in the year 1459. Seventeen-year-old Sir Handsome at first thinks Robyn, with her short hair and sweatpants, a boy and asks him/her to lead him to a priory where he’ll be safe from knaves who attacked his family home at Ludlow Castle. When he sees Robyn of Holy Wood talking into her hand (her cell phone), the amazed fellow looks unready for the electronic age—or even for the Renaissance. But the chocolate granola bar she splits with him really stuns Edward, as does her amazingly detailed map. He dispatches some armored knaves following them; then with a kiss, they part and she wends her way back to civilization. Back in the present, a seeress tells her that Edward is under a Displacing Spell and that magic will bring him back. Indeed, a rose he’s given her and a Duchess Weirdville help, and once back in the past she adopts an Eliza Doolittle/Audrey Hepburn court voice to see her through, later feasts magnificently with King Henry at Kenilworth, and learns that Collin is part of her time-switch. But will she stay?
Robyn winds up making history instead of movies, and RGyR’s time-travelers will be all the happier for it.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-86996-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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