A detailed but slightly flat historical novel.
Stark’s 19th-century violinist proceeds to London for her final act in this, the third in a trilogy of historical novels.
After two decades in Paris, famed British-born American violinist Emily de Koningh (nee Alden) and her family are relocating to London. She isn’t quite looking forward to returning to the land of her birth or to her father, Lord Alden, who sent her to be raised by his best friend in New York. Some of her reservations are personal. Her open marriage to her childhood sweetheart, Corey de Koningh, is variable at best, and her sons—the sullen, politically inclined William and the artistic Connie, rumored to be gay—have just reached adulthood. Other reservations are professional. “I no longer get the lift of joy from playing before an audience, no matter how beautiful the music is,” she tells Corey. “Something is missing for me, and I suppose I’m afraid if I go to England now, I’ll never find it again.” There is a new energy in London’s music scene, however, where the Royal College of Music was recently founded to compete with the storied conservatories of the Continent. Are Emily’s prospects about to experience a similar renaissance, or is her fragile ensemble of friends, relatives, and lovers about to disband for good? Stark’s novel displays a depth of research and command of history. Emily and company are joined by real figures from the period, including Royal College of Music founder Charles Villiers Stanford and Austrian socialite Pauline von Metternich. The history isn’t always injected seamlessly into the story, however, and the dialogue, in particular, can be awkwardly expositional: “You can get inoculated against smallpox, William,” Emily chides her son. “This is the 1880s, remember. The vaccine has been in use successfully for decades!” The novel seems to function mostly as a vehicle for the author’s interest in the period, and the plot is thin. The stakes are never high enough to give Emily’s ennui much meaning, and the period’s musical upheavals, however momentous, are not terribly dramatic on the page.
A detailed but slightly flat historical novel.Pub Date: June 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73588-931-3
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Momentum Ink Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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