A well-researched, robust tale featuring an endearing executioner.
Alleyn (Palace of Justice, 2010, etc.), author of several historical mysteries set in France, fashions a dramatic tale based on an actual family of executioners in 18th-century Paris.
In a hereditary position as the son of the executioner, Charles Sanson is required to carry on the distasteful occupation first assigned to his great-grandfather or else be left disgraced and without a source of income. Although a necessary job to maintain discipline for the rulers of the Regime Ancien, the executioner was reviled, called a butcher and torturer by his countrymen. With few friends and a small pool of available women to wed, an executioner could be assured only of financial security and a restricted social life. When, due to his father’s illness, teenage Charles is forced to take over the role of master executioner of Paris, he struggles to find solace with family and then with women who don’t know his secret. When his lover learns of his true profession and abandons him, he rails: “I’ve nothing to be ashamed of! I’m a good Christian, a gentleman, the king’s servant, an officer of the law, and equal of any of them—I only follow orders the judges give me. Why should I be pointed out, hissed at, despised?” When his path intersects with that of François, a bright, high-spirited teenager of petty nobility with no money and little family, Charles realizes that his role as master executioner compels him to carry out horrific punishments on people whose crimes are often more political and vindictive than felonious. Charles realizes that, despite his father’s belief that they serve the law and avenge the innocent, he is “a tool of a regime that’s revealed itself to be corrupt, malicious, and brutal.” Yet Charles continues to carry out the duties of his hereditary post. No detail is spared in describing the heinous punishments demanded by the judiciary and the king. Alleyn’s exhaustive research pays off handsomely in well-drawn characters and colorful historical context. In particular, her female characters are refreshing in their range and willingness to defy stereotypes. A sequel would be welcome to this deftly imagined tale of the years before the French Revolution.
A well-researched, robust tale featuring an endearing executioner.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492306795
Page Count: 348
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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