Cataclysmic world and family crises entertainingly refracted through a prism of privilege.
A Southern ingénue turned English viscountess and her daughters weather court intrigue, political unrest, illicit romance and the perils of two world wars in Dean’s breathlessly plotted debut.
Delia, a debutante from Virginia, marries much older Lord Ivor Conisborough despite suspicions that his chief agenda for their union is producing an heir. Once installed as the chatelaine of Ivor’s London townhouse and country estates, she has more disillusionment in store: Ivor’s heart belongs to his longtime mistress, Sylvia. Sylvia’s husband Jerome steps into the breach, and he and Delia embark on a lifelong love affair. After Jerome survives World War I, Delia enjoys a heady whirl of parties with Edward, Prince of Wales, and his sybaritic entourage—when she’s not sojourning at Jerome’s Swiss villa. Then status-hungry Sylvia throws Jerome and Ivor over to marry a duke, and Ivor accepts a posting to Egypt. Ensconced in a mansion fronting the Nile, Delia and daughters Petra and Davina adapt well to upper-crust life. Delia brings Petra back to London for the debutante season. There the young woman falls in with a fast set of aristocrats. Meanwhile, Delia is mightily occupied defending her friend and countrywoman Wallis Simpson against malicious insinuations that the American divorcée is a royal pain. Petra falls hard for Jerome’s son Jack, and Delia is compelled to warn her that Jerome might also be Petra’s father. (The secret of Petra’s parentage in this pre–DNA testing era is largely sustained by withholding readily accessible information until the bitter end.) Back in Egypt, Davina, the only Conisborough with a social conscience, is troubled by rumors that beloved Egyptian playboy Marius may be spying for Hitler.
Cataclysmic world and family crises entertainingly refracted through a prism of privilege.Pub Date: March 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7679-3055-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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