A wonderfully researched but indulgently slow-paced novel.
In Gnatz’s imaginative work of historical fiction, Benjamin Franklin travels to France to enlist support for a possible war with England and becomes embroiled in political and romantic intrigue.
Just after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Franklin departs for Paris to secure black powder and weapons for a potential war with England, and to win the backing of King Louis XV. Now a widower in his twilight years, Franklin remains an imposing figure; he’s internationally famous and a magnet for female admirers. His romantic thoughts continually drift toward Marianne Davies, a musician he met in London; however, although his feelings for her are strong, he’s anxious about her chronic bouts of severe melancholia, which she grimly refers to as “the darkness.” She receives a controversial treatment from Dr. Mesmer, who’s seen as much as a “wizard” as a physician. His approach—a precursor to hypnosis—provides her with great relief, but Franklin frowns upon it as pseudoscience. Meanwhile, he also falls in love with Minette Helvétius, and though she returns his affections, she’s far too independent to settle down. When Davies travels with Mesmer to Paris—he’s there to treat the queen—it sets the stage not only for a conclusive confrontation regarding Franklin and Davies’ relationship, but also between Franklin and Mesmer regarding the nature of science. Overall, Gnatz paints a vivid portrait of one of the Founding Fathers. However, he presents Franklin’s intellectual duel with Mesmer in a somewhat pedantic fashion. The author’s research is magisterial, however, and a remarkable display of scholarly rigor; although he permits himself great creative license, he never strays too far from the realm of plausibility. Still, the prose style can sometimes be a bit wooden, and the plot unfolds at a glacial pace, slowed by too many gratuitous parentheses that have the effect of making the book feel overlong.
A wonderfully researched but indulgently slow-paced novel.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 541
Publisher: Leather Apron Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
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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