A delicate, forgiving consideration of mental health and healing.
For Ally Moberley, a pioneering woman doctor in Victorian England who has just made a happy marriage, the future seems bright until the groundbreaking nature of her role, working with mentally troubled female patients, and a return to the stresses of her childhood begin to threaten her own peace of mind.
Matching exceptionally fine prose with pinpoint sensitivity, British novelist Moss (Bodies of Light, 2014, etc.) delivers a thoughtful account of one intelligent, sometimes-fragile woman’s response to a dark, dynamic era. Late-19th-century England thrums with industry, yet the living conditions of its workers are often desperate. Though Ally’s mother was zealously devoted to serving the poor, she lacked compassion for her own children, and Ally, now 30, bears the psychic scars of a cruel childhood. She graduated top of her class from medical school, however, and is newly married to Tom Cavendish, a kindly engineer and lighthouse builder. After a brief period of marital harmony in Cornwall, Tom must depart on a monthslong working trip to Japan, leaving Ally alone, first studying at a local mental asylum and later returning to the harsh family home in Manchester. Chapters narrated in a close third-person from Ally’s perspective, tracing her professional and personal challenges, are intercut with chapters following Tom, who finds himself increasingly enraptured by Japanese culture. Whether evoking Cornish weather, Manchester’s manufacturing grind, or exquisite Japanese vistas, Moss brings lambent detail and humane character analysis to a larger conversation about what threatens women’s sanity—grief, rage, pain, sick households, abusive men. Though too long, slowed by its seriousness and research, and then lifted by a rather-too-neat solution to Ally’s health and employment dilemmas, this is nevertheless a rich work; the quality of its writing and its empathy shine through.
A delicate, forgiving consideration of mental health and healing.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60945-379-4
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
