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 sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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