Fascinating and historically accurate, but the story sinks fast under the weight of clumsy exposition and a stilted style...
More trials and tribulations of the Tudor dynasty from Maxwell (The Queen’s Bastard, 1999, etc).
Henry VIII’s young daughter, Elizabeth, may succeed to England’s throne someday—and her future husband would be king. There are others in the line of succession and rivals to dispatch, but that doesn’t trouble Thomas Seymour, Lord High Admiral and new husband of Henry’s last wife, gentle Catherine Parr. Scheming Thomas has grandiose plans for his advancement at court. The arrogant lord is convinced that a girl as tender and nubile as Elizabeth will succumb sooner or later to his manly charms, especially considering that Anne Boleyn’s wanton blood runs in her veins. Elizabeth proves to be not quite that easy, keeping in mind her mother’s beheading and knowing well the cost of a single misstep, even for a Tudor princess. Also, she loves and respects Catherine, who befriended the lonely, outcast girl before her half-brother Edward was crowned. But Thomas is determined to have her and commences a carefully planned seduction. Innocent Elizabeth is bedeviled by sensual fantasies. Thomas, licking her royal toes . . . and moving slowly upward. Thomas, kissing her passionately. Oh, Thomas, Thomas. . . . He waylays her in the castle and outside, arranges for her to catch him romping half-clothed in bed with Catherine, whose pregnancy has addled her wits. Or is Thomas slowly poisoning the poor woman? At one point, Catherine even helps her evil-hearted husband capture Elizabeth, then lets him slit open the young girl’s gown and bare her breasts. But it all comes to naught: Thomas’s plot to kidnap the boy king is uncovered, and Catherine divorces him. Accused of treason, Elizabeth is exonerated, but there are unanswered questions: Was Thomas her first lover? Did she secretly bear him an illegitimate child and have it killed at birth?
Fascinating and historically accurate, but the story sinks fast under the weight of clumsy exposition and a stilted style crowded with minutiae.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-563-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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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