A novel with compelling subject matter that sometimes struggles to maintain its momentum.
In his debut historical novel, Collins delivers a colorful but disjointed fictional portrait of an Irish community at the onset of the 19th-century Great Famine.
This novel, the first in a forthcoming series, centers on Irish country folk Margaret and Flynn O’Connell and their two children but also features a Dickensian cast of do-gooders and villains in the nearby town of Killarney. Collins tantalizingly scatters seeds of intrigue among many plotlines—Margaret O’Connell hides the fact that she had another lover before her husband; Flynn once served as a French Foreign Legionnaire but never told Margaret; a well-known revolutionary mysteriously comes to the aid of a grieving widow; a beautiful gypsy girl seduces a talented footballer and ensnares him with a pregnancy—but he brings relatively few of them to fruition. The intriguing characters bring scenes to life, but their stories never quite take off. The novel also often relies on passive language; for example, when a fisherman splashes water on Margaret’s face after she faints, “[t]he clothing of both drip from the sudden storm furnished by the man acquainted with the powers of water.” Sometimes such language suggests an Irish cadence; at other times, it frustratingly obscures the action. Even when the novel focuses on the famine’s devastation, capturing it from diverse points of view, its chapters read more like discrete character studies than complementary storylines. The novel ramps up the narrative tension in its last quarter, when a Halloween kidnapping unites the townspeople and sheds light on their interpersonal ties. The author also effectively draws on his personal knowledge of Irish history, folklore, customs and language to re-create the novel’s place and time; the most sure-footed passages illuminate the way a Gaelic greeting solidifies a new friendship, for example, or how peasant dwellings were leveled by unfeeling landlords.
A novel with compelling subject matter that sometimes struggles to maintain its momentum.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475284829
Page Count: 380
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2012
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
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
Who was Shakespeare?
Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593497210
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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