Stock characters and predictable situations, not worth revisiting in the promised sequel involving younger sister Gabrielle.
Carroll’s latest romance (The Bride Finder, 1998, etc.) fulfills the generic rules in pedestrian fashion, swinging back to a time of witchery in France on the eve of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
Carroll tones down the complicated Protestant-Catholic conflict against which her fable of the highborn Cheney sisters is set. In 1572, eldest sister Ariane is “the Lady of Faire Isle” and leader of the island’s “Daughters of the Earth,” otherwise known as witches. The girls’ mother, a famous healer, died of a broken heart when her husband was wooed away by the conniving black magic of the dowager queen, Catherine de Medici. Catherine’s latest plot involves a pair of poisoned gloves she used to kill Henry of Navarre’s mother. (Jeanne of Navarre had planned to call off her son’s marriage to Catherine’s daughter, suspecting that the truce being negotiated between the Protestants and Catholics was a ruse.) A wounded captain of Henry’s Huguenot army takes refuge among the sisters at Faire Isle, holding the gloves as proof of Catherine’s black artistry. This leads the “Dark Queen” to unleash her fury on the Cheney sisters. Meanwhile, Carroll employs every trick in the romance book to portray the courtship of serene-eyed Ariane by her uncouth, irresistibly virile neighbor, Comte de Renard, whose forebears were also versed in the magic arts. With a ring he blackmails her into wearing, Ariane is able to summon Renard instantly whenever she is in distress—three times during the course of the narrative. It’s all utterly conventional. Our swooning, virtuous heroine is never too assertive to be invulnerable to the count’s superior strength. Her rake is handily tamed. Her sisters provide pat counterpoint: One is sweet, one sour and suspicious. The prose is forgettable, and the backdrop would have been compelling only if Carroll had resisted dumbing it down for her readers.
Stock characters and predictable situations, not worth revisiting in the promised sequel involving younger sister Gabrielle.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-43796-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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