Not all bad by any means, but Dickens’s Tale remains the gold standard, and Alleyn’s bold effort is little more than a pale...
Canned history and muted histrionics are dutifully paraded in this earnest, overlong debut, which retells Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities from the viewpoint of the improbably heroic Sydney Carton.
He’s remembered as the jaded English attorney who substituted—and sacrificed—himself for his “looking-glass image,” embattled French nobleman Charles Darnay, the beloved husband of (Carton’s secret love) Lucie Manette. In Alleyn’s version, Carton is the disgruntled son of a demanding father who forces him into the practice of law, and further embittered when the first woman he loves leaves him for a wealthier man. While studying in Paris, then on a surprising later occasion, Carton makes the acquaintance of Darnay, a rather passive sort encumbered by a scandalous family history, a trumped-up charge of spying, and eventually a “denunciation” by bloodthirsty Jacobins who are sending royalty, aristocrats, and all suspected “enemies of the [French] Revolution” headlong to the guillotine. Carton, having fled the law and England and returned to Paris, piques our interest as a self-despising wastrel with tendencies toward nobility of spirit; but Alleyn’s potentially striking characterization is subordinated to his inevitable experience or observation of such watershed phenomena as the storming of the Bastille, the murder of revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat and the “Law of Suspects” jerry-rigged to identify supposed “traitors,” as well as Carton’s (varyingly credible) relationships with historical figures Robespierre, Saint-Just, Danton, and Camille Desmoulins. Matters aren’t helped by Alleyn’s breathless prose, particularly her unfortunately high-flown dialogue, a mixture of romantic fustian and exposition-heavy authorial overmanagement. Still, several of her fictional characters strike a few sparks—notably Darnay’s cousin, fiery bluestocking Eleonore d’Ambert, who beds, weds, betrays, and abandons Carton with seemingly equal amounts of enthusiasm and savoir faire.
Not all bad by any means, but Dickens’s Tale remains the gold standard, and Alleyn’s bold effort is little more than a pale imitation of it.Pub Date: July 14, 2000
ISBN: 1-56947-197-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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