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
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
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
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