Begiebing’s narrative tends to get bogged down in historical detail, but it’s arresting enough to carry you through to the...
In this latest American Gothic from Begiebing (The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton, 1999, etc.), a mysterious girl runs afoul of her relatives and becomes the obsession of a young artist in 18th-century New England.
For all of his refined artistic sensibilities, Daniel Sanborn is a man who knows how to get ahead. Trained as a painter in London, he realizes that England in the 1740s is a buyer’s market for portraiture, so he strikes out for the American colonies, just then full of rising merchants beginning to fancy themselves patrons of the arts. Not long after his arrival in Boston, Daniel wins his first commission, to paint a portrait of 12-year-old Rebecca Wentworth in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The orphaned Rebecca was adopted by Squire Browne, her father’s cousin, who lost two sons of his own to the same plague that carried off her parents. Beautiful and phenomenally intelligent, Rebecca is an artist herself: untutored, but skilled enough to make Daniel envious of her talents. Her wild, brooding canvases, far beyond the mainstream of colonial taste, are taken as signs of madness, and Rebecca’s guardian tries to cure her of such fantasies. The squire first sends her to work on a remote farm where she will have no time to paint, and later attempts to marry her off. Thwarted in both plans, he decides to commit her to a lunatic asylum. Daniel learns of Squire Browne’s plans from the girl’s former governess, who wants to help her but is powerless to intervene. Awed by Rebecca’s talent, and horrified by her guardian’s insensitivity, Daniel tries to save her. But there are a number of obstacles in the way, not the least of them the American Revolution, which is just getting underway. And Daniel soon has to confront the painful realization that his feelings for Rebecca are not wholly disinterested.
Begiebing’s narrative tends to get bogged down in historical detail, but it’s arresting enough to carry you through to the end. A truly creepy tale.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2003
ISBN: 1-58465-284-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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