Reader, this lily needed no gilding.
Puzzling over Rochester, the brooding romantic antihero created by Charlotte Brontë in her classic Jane Eyre, a debut novelist elaborates his back story and adds some new, explanatory developments to the tale.
Edward Fairfax Rochester meets Jane Eyre two-thirds of the way through Shoemaker’s sizable, solid first work of fiction, which means that most of her book is devoted to his earlier life and character formation, while the closing third retells the familiar narrative, this time delivered from his, not her, first-person perspective. It’s at that switchover point that “gruffness,” brusqueness, growling, and “foul mood[s]” begin to characterize the man who, previously, had seemed not so much angry as a wounded introvert. Shoemaker evokes Rochester’s comfortless childhood that leaves the boy “yearning for the larger shows of love” denied by his widowed father and callous elder brother, Rowland. Pining for a real home and family, he must make do with an eccentric private school and two friends, nicknamed Carrot and Touch, a learning-the-ropes job at a woolen mill under the not-unkind care of Mr. Wilson, and four lonely years at Cambridge University before setting off for Jamaica to make his fortune and fall into the engineered trap of marriage to mad Bertha Mason. As the years pass, Shoemaker disposes of Carrot, Touch, and Wilson, as well as Rowland and others, intensifying Rochester’s isolation at Thornfield-Hall, with Bertha raving in the attic. And then Jane arrives. While these facts conform largely to Brontë’s romance—there’s one significant departure—the character of Rochester doesn’t quite. This figure, who is submissive and unchallenging as a child and young man, lacks the saturnine charisma of the original. Also absent are the physical presence and the dangerous, irresistible dynamism of Brontë’s Byronic icon.
Reader, this lily needed no gilding.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4555-6980-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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
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