Although classified as historical fiction, this book is really a romance dressed in period clothes, and readers of the first...
Dean’s (Palace Circle, 2009) Golden Prince of Wales makes a romantic run at British court intrigue.
Rose, the auburn-tressed eldest Houghton girl, has a cute meet with the Prince of Wales. Driving home from Dartmouth with his disapproving equerry, the future king, whose family calls him “David,” takes a curve and accidentally knocks suffragette Rose off her bike. She’s the daughter of nobility who, along with her three sisters, lives at nearby Snowberry, a beautiful estate not far from the Prince’s university. The Prince takes her home and meets her three sisters: Iris, with her brown hair and crush on the boy next door, is the plainest of the three; Marigold, a titian-haired beauty, has few morals and a penchant for scandal; and the youngest sister, Lily, is an enchanting girl with blue-black ringlets. Lily is guileless and gifted with the ability to make every man who meets her fall in love with her. David finds immense joy in escaping his rigid palace life, where he is overwhelmed by the duties of his office. He falls for Lily and schemes to spend more time with her. When he proposes and she accepts, he runs up against immovable opposition in the form of his parents, the reining King George and Queen Mary. But David is determined to overcome their objections and sets out to do so. Based loosely on the life of the Duke of Windsor, who ruled as king for less than a year before abdicating his throne to marry a twice-divorced American, Dean offers an interesting glimpse into court life right after the turn of the previous century, but often the details overwhelm the story. Every item of clothing worn by the sisters is minutely described, as are their physical attributes. The writing itself is uninspired and cliché-ridden.
Although classified as historical fiction, this book is really a romance dressed in period clothes, and readers of the first genre may find the flashing eyes, deep kisses and heaving bosoms tiresome after awhile.Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7679-3056-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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