A ripping medieval yarn, despite occasional shortfalls.
An aging troubadour recalls his young life in the service of England’s greatest knight in this riveting historic debut novel by Hamilton.
An elderly Lewellyn tells a story of his childhood, when he was ordered to ride out on a hunting party with Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine from Lusignan Castle. An orphaned scullery boy who, according to himself, is the “lowest of the low,” he’s surprised by the pleasant attention that one member of the party shows him. “Knights rarely acknowledged the existence of the serving class,” he muses. The young knight in question is Sir William Marshal, a tournament champion with an increasing reputation as a remarkable swordsman. When Baron Lusignan and his men attack the procession, Marshal shows his resilience in battle, disabling multiple opponents and allowing the queen sufficient time to flee. Finally overwhelmed by his attackers, he’s knocked out cold and awakens, wounded, in a filthy prison cell. The boy Lewellyn is also a captive, and during their imprisonment they develop a close bond. Lewellyn helps to remove a piece of chain mail lodged in the knight’s leg; later, they talk candidly of their lives. After Marshal’s ransom is paid, Lewellyn expects to return to life as a kitchen hand, but finds that the enigmatic knight has chosen him as his personal servant. As Marshal’s political reputation grows, Lewellyn finds himself in close proximity to courtly life, observing the machinations of King Henry II and those plotting against him. This is an intimate, complex first-person portrait of a respected nobleman through the eyes of a devoted aide. Llewellyn is self-effacing, yet he’s a carefully crafted, multifaceted character with a delightfully shrewd outlook. The book might have benefited from a more thorough edit, as some of the word choices are occasionally cringeworthy: “KERWHANG!!!” is the sound of knights in battle, and the dying King Henry is said to slip “in and out of conscientiousness.” Still, the story makes for compelling reading.
A ripping medieval yarn, despite occasional shortfalls.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4922-0218-9
Page Count: 380
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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