Beautiful prose and delicate handling prevent this melodrama from becoming maudlin.
Star-crossed lovers in India at the turn of the 20th century, drawn from first-time novelist Mandanna’s family history.
In the lush region of Coorg in southwestern India, three interrelated noble families, the Nachimandas, Kambeymadas and Palladas, dominate a bucolic mountain valley. A flight of herons marks the birth of Devi, whom her grandmother Tayi recognizes as a special child. Similarly, herons are present when young Machu, a scion of the Kambeymadas, admires baby Devi's lungpower. Devi grows up with her cousin Devanna, who is adopted by her father after his mother’s suicide. The two are inseparable playmates, until Devanna’s burgeoning interest in botany and scholarly mien attracts a mentor, Reverend Gundert, the founder of a nearby mission school. Devi, a beauty, has a long history with Machu. At ten, she attends a tiger wedding celebrating Machu’s daring conquest of a tiger. From thence Machu will be known as the “tiger killer.” For years, Devi, determined to wed Machu, refuses proposals from many other suitors. Devanna, meanwhile, excels at his studies, and Gundert secures his admission to Bangalore Medical College, where he is mercilessly hazed by upperclassmen who envy his genius. Although the attraction between Machu and Devi is palpable, he won’t acknowledge it because he has, to honor a Hindu god, vowed to remain celibate for 12 years. However, Devi promises to wait for him, and in the meantime they meet in the jungle for chaste but impassioned encounters. Devanna, who has always loved Devi, is driven mad when his tormentors sodomize him and murder his beloved pet. Returning home blind drunk, he rapes Devi, and her family can find no other solution than to force a marriage between them. She gives birth to a son, Nanjappa. Sworn to secrecy by Tayi, Devi cannot reveal to the devastated Machu why she broke her promise. Tragic consequences ensue, which will alter the destinies of the three clans.
Beautiful prose and delicate handling prevent this melodrama from becoming maudlin.Pub Date: March 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-56410-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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