An imaginative work that brings the story of a little-known artist to vivid life.
Dunlap offers a historical novel loosely based on the life of French miniaturist painter Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, who forged a career even though the odds were against her.
This sweeping saga tells a story of a real-life 18th-century woman as she pursues her art against the backdrop of the French Revolution. Labille-Guiard was one of the first women to become a member of the Académie Royale and the first to set up a studio at the Louvre. Dunlap presents this trailblazer’s story, filling in historical gaps with fictionalized elements. The novel opens as Labille-Guiard makes the decision to leave her abusive husband and pursue painting—a career that always interested her but, because of sexist restrictions, eluded her. A shrewd businesswoman, she first paints anonymous erotic works that sell well and allow her to open her studio, and her career as a mainstream artist starts to take off. At the same time, a rival female artist, Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun, has caught the attention of the queen, Marie Antoinette, while general upheaval brews across the country. Dunlap’s expansive novel will have readers constantly guessing as to what’s true and what isn’t. Fortunately, the author does a fine job of clearing this up in an epilogue; for instance, she notes that there’s no proof that the artist created erotic works, but points out that they were a common way for artists of the era to survive. (Indeed, the minimal surviving information about Labille-Guiard allows for a great deal of creative license.) Still, the author manages to generate great tension, showing her subject to be stuck in the middle of the revolution, both literally and spiritually: “Adélaïde was caught between the structure of patronage that supported her career and her desire to embrace radical change.” In the end, the novel can be enjoyed as an intriguing gloss on history, but also as a sweet love story between her and her second husband, painter François-André Vincent, as well as a behind-the-scenes look at the intrigue of the era’s art world.
An imaginative work that brings the story of a little-known artist to vivid life.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-097-0
Page Count: 296
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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