Fans can take their seats for another exhilarating ride through Arthurian Britain.
Miles, author of a Guenevere trilogy (The Child of the Holy Grail, 2001, etc.), again gives a persuasive feminist tweak to an old tale.
Setting the oft-told story of Tristan and Isolde in the context of Goddess-worship and Mother-right, Miles counterpoints knightly derring-do with decisive women empowered by ancient rights and beliefs. As the story begins, Sir Marhaus, current lover of the widowed Irish queen, has determined to prove his valor by sailing to Cornwall to fight weak King Mark. The queen’s only daughter Isolde, a healer who believes in love and peace, fears the invasion’s consequences and resists her mother’s desire for her to marry. In Cornwall, Marhaus is killed in single combat by King Mark’s nephew Tristan, but not before wounding his slayer with a poisoned sword. Tristan becomes deathly ill, and the only antidote to the poison is in Ireland. Disguised as a wounded pilgrim, he’s taken to the royal palace in Dublin, where Isolde nurses him while the queen mourns Marhaus. Knight and princess are soon head over heels, but Tristan fears retribution for killing Marhaus; once healed he returns to Cornwall and learns that the King has decided to marry Isolde in order to produce an heir. Isolde knows it is her royal duty to marry, but on the voyage to Cornwall she and Tristan (now acting as the king‘s emissary) become lovers. The newlywed queen faces many enemies in Cornwall, including Mark’s jealous mistress and Christian priests opposed to the rule of the goddess. After surviving the ordeal of water (she has to stay submerged for the count of 70 times 7), Isolde returns to Ireland to tend her ailing mother and prepare to rule. Tristan has obligations of his own to fulfill, but their love remains ready for further tests.
Fans can take their seats for another exhilarating ride through Arthurian Britain.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-60960-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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