A fun romp through Paris and history, one that nevertheless makes us understand that the sins of the past are not truly past.
A melancholy and mournful tale of the past's inextricable relationship to the present.
Faulks (Pistache Returns, 2017, etc.) gives us a novel that uses World War II as a way to think about the contemporary refugee crisis and nationalist politics in Europe. He brings us the story of Tariq, a lovelorn, disaffected, and perpetually aroused Algerian teenager whose unfulfilling studies and infatuation with his virginal classmate Laila fill him with romantic dreams of fleeing his home for the streets of Europe. The son of a half-French, half-Arab woman whose father was a French settler, Tariq eventually abandons Algeria for Paris. Meanwhile, an American academic named Hannah arrives in Paris in order to do research on a historical project about the lives of Parisian women under the Vichy government during the war. Hannah is more concerned with the past than the present, but she feels increasingly empty in her history-obsessed life. As Tariq floats through the streets of Paris, looking for shelter and work, his and Hannah's paths eventually cross; soon, Tariq is a lodger in Hannah's apartment. Eventually, however, Hannah's obsession with the past collides with Tariq's complicated family history. Tariq soon finds that the hatred and xenophobia that drove French complicity with Nazi Germany and the settling of Algeria have not evaporated but taken on more subtle manifestations. Narrated in the first person from both Hannah's and Tariq's perspectives, this is a briskly told and engaging novel that sets us in the bustling streets of mid-2000s Paris. However, the prose is workmanlike, even dull at times, never rising to the lyrical heights of books whose subject matter this shares. The comparison might be unfair, but it's hard not to recall novels like Sebald's gorgeous Austerlitz when reading this novel, which suffers for the comparison. Tariq's and Hannah's voices are occasionally unconvincing. Taking Tariq as a hard-up teenage Algerian runaway is difficult when, after running into a mysteriously familiar woman on the Paris Metro, he utters, "I felt she was meant for me as the man I could become, as the man I deep down already am—an older, better man beneath all the clumsy, unimportant stuff of being young and useless and being me." Most unfortunately, the novel's twists are easy to see coming. Still, this is an entertaining novel with memorable characters.
A fun romp through Paris and history, one that nevertheless makes us understand that the sins of the past are not truly past.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-30565-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PROFILES
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
© 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.
