The best kind of historical fiction, with characters that ignore the heavy hand of history and instead live their own full...
A literate, wonderfully written, alluring tale, the second in a trilogy (after Guenevere: Queen of the Summer Country), offers a subtle feminist interpretation of the Arthurian legends as it continues the story of Guenevere, forced to choose between love and duty for the sake of her kingdom.
Luminously evoking the sunny uplands of the Summer Country, the splendors of Camelot, and the dark woods where the evil Morgan lurks, Miles celebrates a woman, a queen in her right, and the equal partner of Arthur. Now in her mid-30s, Guenevere is both a mother mourning the death of her only child and a wife taking the measure of her husband—and finding him, despite his many virtues, flawed. Exercising her prerogative, as hereditary Queen of the Summer Country, to choose her own knights, she has turned in love to Lancelot, the Knight of the Sacred Lake, but she is also loyal to Arthur. As high king, he united the smaller kingdoms to defeat the Saxons, but in turn he is now threatened by jealous knights and the vengeful Morgan, his half-sister. A good but not especially intelligent man, Miles’s Arthur was seduced by Morgan and bore him a son, Mordred, the sole heir to the Pendragon dynasty. As Guenevere, accused of murder and witchcraft by the Christians, who scorn the old ways of the goddess, is put on trial, Merlin travels the land in search of Mordred, and Arthur is grievously wounded by a knight serving Morgan. He rallies, but Morgan, whose father was killed by Uther, Arthur’s father, is bent on more mischief. A distraught Guenevere sends Lancelot away and, heartbroken, visits the Lady of the Lake, the ruler of Avalon and guardian of the sacred treasures of the goddess. There, she is comforted by the Lady’s predictions and returns to Camelot, Arthur, and what is to come.
The best kind of historical fiction, with characters that ignore the heavy hand of history and instead live their own full and complex lives. A terrific read.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-609-60623-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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