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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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