A smoothly written tale of 1880s art and medicine with engrossing characters.
Meek’s historical novel encompasses Sigmund Freud’s early medical career and the milieu of the Impressionist painters.
Julie Forette has no desire to stay in Marseilles and do laundry for a living, like her mother. Instead, she develops an unusual ambition: to collect things that are ephemeral and intangible. She “forage[s] for dreams,” asking neighbors to tell her their most memorable ones and searching for truths concealed. Arriving in Paris in 1886, she talks her way into a job as a transcriber for renowned doctor Jean-Martin Charcot. Of particular interest to her is his research hospital, Salpêtrière, which houses neurologically impaired patients. At one of Charcot’s lectures, Julie meets and befriends intern Sigmund Freud. They share cocaine-fueled insights and an interest in helping sensitive young Salpêtrière inmate Sabrine Weiss. Charcot regularly showcases Sabrine in demonstrations, triggering her to pass through stages of a “hystero-attack.” On a walk, Julie notices a painting in a shop window: a still life by Paul Cézanne, which becomes her entry into Impressionism. Fascinated, Julie eventually meets the reclusive painter and poses nude for him in exchange for one of his dreams. Other artists she encounters include Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, and Paul Gauguin. Julie’s main objective, though, is saving Sabrine, with whom she’s revealed to have a deeply personal connection. In this novel, Meek skillfully entwines the worlds of Impressionism and 19th-century medicine; both worlds are compelling, and the back-and-forth between them ensures that the narrative never flags. Settings, from Charcot’s opulent house to Cezanne’s one-room studio, are well described, but it’s the memorable characterization that anchors the story. Julie’s intelligence, independence, and beauty attract admirers, and she pursues sex without shame or guilt. Freud could easily have become a caricature, but he’s portrayed sympathetically as struggling to balance the physical and psychological sides of healing. Even minor characters shine, such as Degas’ muse Suzanne Valadon, who yearns to be an artist herself.
A smoothly written tale of 1880s art and medicine with engrossing characters.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781962465137
Page Count: 556
Publisher: Historium Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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