Faulks has risen to the challenge splendidly with this "homage" to Wodehouse. Jeeves and Wooster live again!
Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, the feckless young master and his erudite gentleman’s gentleman, creations of the great English humorist P.G. Wodehouse, are back, courtesy of his inspired fellow countryman and novelist Faulks (A Possible Life, 2012, etc.). This is the first Jeeves and Wooster novel in some 40 years.
Faulks notes modestly that he has “tried to provide an echo” of the originals. He has done more than that. He has captured Bertie’s voice, his innocent zest and his spirited banter with Jeeves to a fare-thee-well. This novel begins boldly with a role reversal—Bertie as servant waiting on Jeeves—but the real beginning is on the French Riviera, where Bertie meets a stunning beauty, Georgiana Meadowes. He’s smitten, she’s encouraging, but there’s a problem. Orphaned early, Georgiana has been raised lovingly by her uncle, Sir Henry Hackwood, currently strapped for cash. To help him save the family home, Georgiana feels obliged to marry a fella with moola: Her fiance has been designated. Back in London, there’s a further complication. Bertie’s best friend Woody had been engaged to Sir Henry’s daughter Amelia; a misunderstanding has caused the dear girl to break it off. Good egg that he is, Bertie sees his first order of business as reconciling Woody and Amelia. More misunderstandings ensue, resulting in Jeeves being mistaken for a peer of the realm by Sir Henry and invited to his home in deepest Dorset; to gain access to the premises, Bertie must willy-nilly become Jeeves’ manservant and fraternize below stairs. The comic possibilities are legion, and Faulks exploits them all, with Bertie threatening to land in the proverbial soup at every turn. Meanwhile, Jeeves, always a fount of knowledge, proves himself also a master strategist of the mating game. Bertie, still in thrall to his former teacher’s dictum (“Women are queer cattle”), needs nudging. A smackeroo on the lips from Georgiana during amateur theatricals does the trick.
Faulks has risen to the challenge splendidly with this "homage" to Wodehouse. Jeeves and Wooster live again!Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04759-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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
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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