Engaging food for thought for Austen fans.
Bennett (The Perfect Visit, 2011), in his second work of historical fiction, explores Francis Rawdon-Hastings’ relationship to a young Jane Austen and her effect on him well after her death.
In a story that jumps back and forth between 1801 and 1823, Hastings—a real man known as Lord Moira from age 40 to his early 60s—was taken by two young, awe-inspiring women: Jane Austen and, later, the novel’s fictitious Vanessa Horwood. Austen, the budding British writer, and Horwood, a Canadian musician, share a certain likeness that Lord Moira cannot ignore. While Moira develops feelings for Horwood, her life becomes more entwined with Austen’s. As Moira attempts to mask his past flirtations with Austen, Horwood’s well-being is put at stake. Horwood, who is acquainted with Austen’s siblings, finds herself caught with a dark, secretive financial burden, a downfall of the Austen family that author Bennett embellishes for dramatic effect. With scholarly knowledge of Austen’s life and works, Bennett uses what little the world knows of Austen’s young life to his advantage and inserts some cleverly written pieces to the unfinished puzzle. Although unlikely, there’s a chance Moira and Austen may have shared an intimate connection during these years, and Bennett offers hypothetical explanations behind Austen’s earlier works and her mysterious personal life. Austen fans searching for another intriguing though debatable theory will find plenty to sift through here. Austen neophytes, however, will most likely need to conduct some additional research to appreciate this historical fiction that has hints of fan fiction. The cumbersome cast of characters, some real, some imagined, would be easier to digest with some previous knowledge of Austen’s life and works. Nevertheless, dialogue between characters is often captivating, and the book reads splendidly.
Engaging food for thought for Austen fans.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494475192
Page Count: 232
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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