Rayner (Murder Book, 1997, etc.) captures the vaunting spirit of skyscrapers and their creators with delicacy and freshness....
An atmospheric, if ultimately overwrought, story of love and architecture in war-torn Finland and 1920s New York.
Esko Vaananen meets his true love, Katerina Malysheva, in 1901, when he is just 11. Her father, an embittered drunk and a fierce communist, is the Russian governor of the rural Finnish province where Esko lives. There’s only one phone in this remote village, yet the boy is entranced by the promise of modern architecture. Badly scarred and blind in one eye after a fire set by his mother before she killed herself, Esko dreams of creating buildings free from “the oppressive weight of the commitment to a useless past,” but he can’t liberate himself from his obsession with Katerina. Even though, by 1917, Esko is a rising young architect in Helsinki with no interest in politics, he becomes embroiled on the White side in Finland’s civil war to avenge Katerina’s abuse at the hands of Russia’s victorious Reds. Thinking she’s dead, Esko marries a female architect and begins to establish himself in Finland, but when he spots photographs by “Kate Malysheva” in Vanity Fair magazine, he embarks post-haste for America. There, he encounters Paul Mantilini, an Al Capone–like gangster who declares himself Esko’s blood brother after the Finn saves his life, and W.P. Kirby, an architect in the Frank Lloyd Wright school who teaches Esko that the pure, new style he strives for must be rooted in reality. “We’re trying to help people live,” Kirby says. “With harmony and a little grace. People, land, and building united.” Esko approaches this vision in a complex designed for Andrew MacCormick, a sort of Rockefeller millionaire who turns out to be Katerina’s husband. As the story reaches a melodramatic climax, even more improbable developments pile on thick and fast. Nonetheless, the author’s vivid renderings of wintry, pessimistic Finland and jazzy, anything-is-possible New York linger in the memory.
Rayner (Murder Book, 1997, etc.) captures the vaunting spirit of skyscrapers and their creators with delicacy and freshness. Too bad he fell back on hackneyed plot devices.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019634-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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
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
PROFILES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
