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THE LOST ORPHAN

Name: THE LOST ORPHAN
Author: Stacey Halls
ISBN: 978-0-7783-0932-1

by Stacey Halls ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020

Character motivation is the main puzzle here.

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In 1740s London, a mother attempting to retrieve her child must first unsnarl a mystery—and so must readers.

Halls’ (The Familiars, 2019) two adult protagonists, whose stories alternate in long sections, are Bess Bright, a working-class London shrimp vendor, and Alexandra Callard, the wealthy widow of whalebone merchant Daniel. Like many impoverished Londoners, Bess cannot afford to raise her child, Clara, whom she delivers as a newborn to the Foundling Hospital. Six years later, after painstakingly accumulating the fee for Clara’s release, Bess is told that Clara was reclaimed the day after her admission—by Bess herself. Unpicking this conundrum will be the book’s major focus, to its detriment. As Bess continues her quest at the hospital, with the help of its sympathetic physician, Dr. Mead, she encounters Mrs. Callard and her child, Charlotte, on what will prove to be one of their rare outings. On a hunch that has everything to do with the brief assignation—with Daniel Callard—that impregnated her, Bess assumes that Charlotte is Clara. Cut to Alexandra, who is raising Charlotte as her own. Though she's a first-person narrator, Alexandra withholds information on several key issues, particularly how she came by Charlotte and exactly how much she knows of Charlotte’s parentage. Why is Alexandra housebound by choice? And obsessed with locks and maps? When Bess, calling herself Eliza Smith, wangles a position as Charlotte’s nursemaid, it is unclear why Dr. Mead, Alexandra’s only friend besides her sister, Ambrosia, recommends “Eliza” for the job when he knows her real name. The puzzle-box plot distracts readers from the far more compelling enigmas that have made “lost orphans” of all three main characters. A notable strength of the novel is the depiction of the entrenched social injustice that affords slum-dwellers like Bess so few options. Various mid-18th-century subsistence occupations are vividly evoked, including Bess’ workdays doling out boiled shrimp from her hat and “linkboys,” who guide people through London’s unlit streets at night.

Character motivation is the main puzzle here.

Pub Date: April 7, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-7783-0932-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Harlequin MIRA

Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

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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

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.