Strikingly original and thematically complex. Readers who like to be challenged will devour this—and wonder eagerly what...
A wet nurse in 14th-century France sustains an entire town with her milk during a siege.
In 1349, 15-year-old Blanche was miraculously borne aloft in church as the inhabitants of Villeneuve prayed for deliverance from pestilence. Townsfolk gave her the surname Mirabilis (“astonishing”), venerating Blanche until it became clear she was pregnant. In 1362, her 12-year-old daughter, Bonne Tardieu (“God’s bastard”), watched as Blanche perished in the church set ablaze by those same townsfolk. Now Bonne is 22, living on precarious sufferance as a wet nurse in an insular society brilliantly re-created, from the physical filth of the streets and the residents (who seldom have a chance to bathe) to the political machinations of the priests and the powerful. Though her illegitimate baby died six years ago, Bonne keeps her milk flowing between jobs by suckling her friend Godfridus, a journeyman carver working on the new church who dreams of praising God in his own, innovative sculpture. Hired by wealthy, pregnant widow Radegonde Putemonnoie, who feeds her lavishly to improve her milk, Bonne flourishes even as the English besiege Villeneuve: an attack by a starving artisan shows her how she can nourish the hungry town. Baroque though the story developments are (Bonne also rescues Hercule, a seeming child who turns out to be a dwarf fleeing his murderous noble master), Cokal’s elegant prose never stresses the weirdness, focusing instead on the characters’ longings for love and transcendence. Bitter, provocative Hercule and tormented Godfridus are strong supporting players, as are a power-mongering priest and a bakerwoman who voices the volatile emotions of the town masses, ready to cry “saint!” one moment and “witch!” the next. Proud, secretive Radegonde seems closest to the author, who views the medieval church with a sardonic eye but keeps an open mind about the “miracles” that overcrowd the close of an otherwise meticulously plotted and thoughtfully developed first novel.
Strikingly original and thematically complex. Readers who like to be challenged will devour this—and wonder eagerly what this adventurous newcomer will do next.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14753-5
Page Count: 389
Publisher: BlueHen/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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