Hamilton often took Eliza’s advice but, the authors imply, not often enough.
Eliza Hamilton claims her own place in American history.
This latest in the recent onslaught of Hamilton novels (The Hamilton Affair, by Elizabeth Cobbs, 2016, etc.) is narrated by the great man's wife, Eliza, also known by her childhood name of Betsy. Since Eliza is telling the story after her husband’s death, her mature perspective often casts doubt on her youthful one, as when she views her initial assessment of Hamilton’s loyalty against her later experience of his infidelity. If readers aren’t already familiar with Hamilton’s imbroglios, his widow's rueful recollections would guarantee spoilers galore. Eliza, the tomboyish daughter of pioneer, planter, slaveholder, general, and politician Philip Schuyler, sets male hearts aflutter, including that of future president James Monroe. Her reputation as “the finest tempered girl in the world” attracts more financially secure suitors, but she chooses Gen. Washington’s aide-de-camp, Hamilton, and marries him in 1780. Through Eliza’s eyes we are treated to an in-depth portrait of Hamilton, not to mention forward-looking psychoanalysis of his genius and personality defects. With his formidable intellect and powers of concentration, he is able to almost single-handedly shape the new democracy’s economy and tax structure. On the other hand, his hypersensitivity due to his illegitimate birth and hardscrabble childhood seems at regular intervals to unravel his best intentions. Episodic rather than plot-driven, the novel suffers from Dray and Kamoie's (America's First Daughter, 2016) seeming inability to choose what to summarize and what to depict as scenes in the book. Cliffhangers introduced very early are dropped, such as the first time Hamilton rides off to quell a mutiny, or take far too long to pay off, like a hinted-at romance between Hamilton and Eliza’s sister Angelica. Still, the novel is unflinching in detailing Eliza’s reactions, for example in her fraught encounters with Monroe throughout her life, her pre-duel compassion for Aaron Burr, and her many frustrations as Hamilton’s helpmeet, moral center, and de facto literary executor.
Hamilton often took Eliza’s advice but, the authors imply, not often enough.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-246616-7
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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