Good, clean entertainment, with plenty of period detail and a healthy dose of modern irony.
Garcia y Robertson’s latest historical (after Knight Errant, 2001, etc.), this set in 1460s England during the War of the Roses.
If you can’t tell the Yorkists from the Lancastrians, don’t worry: Lady Robyn of Pontefract has trouble keeping them straight, too, and she’s engaged to marry Edward IV. She’s not particularly dim or ill-informed, mind you; it’s just that she was born in the US about five hundred years after Edward died. Robyn dabbled in witchcraft in a New Age-y kind of way, you see, and got more than she bargained for when she accidentally cast a spell that took her back to 1461, with civil war raging about her. She adjusted to life without cars pretty well for a Californian, but she finds life without coffee difficult and will never get used to the clothes. She still has her Palm Pilot, however, and finds it useful for keeping a diary of the events taking place around her—which are dramatic indeed. Robyn has managed to ingratiate herself with Edward, Prince of Wales, thus gaining access to the highest levels of English politics during a time of great turmoil. The weak-minded Henry VI is tottering on the brink of insanity (he made Robyn a knight and bequeathed her vast tracts of land for no apparent reason when he met her for the first time), and intrigues have already sprung up to wrest the throne from him. Edward’s father Richard, Duke of York, is the leading contender and has a sizable army behind him. Robyn, who stands to become the Queen of England someday if Edward’s father succeeds, is excited by the possibilities but still wary of the whole enterprise, having seen already how short life expectancy is for heirs apparent in medieval England. If only she could get back to the prosaic, safe 21st century. . . .
Good, clean entertainment, with plenty of period detail and a healthy dose of modern irony.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-86995-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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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