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
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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