A lively reminder of the perils of marrying kings and princes, however glam the bride.
British author Dunn, author of seven previous novels, debuts in the US with a lively and contemporary-flavored take on a royal wife who, like Princess Diana, made enemies in high places.
The story of Anne Boleyn, the woman whose love for a King changed the way England worshipped—at a price.—is told in alternate chapters by Anne and Lucy Cornwallis, the King’s confectioner. Anne, a prisoner in the Tower and about to be executed on trumped-up charges of adultery—Henry wants to marry Jane Seymour, hoping she will bear him a son—is writing her memoirs for her daughter, the young Princess Elizabeth. While Anne’s account is somewhat self-serving and defensive, Lucy’s is merely that of an eyewitness to the unfolding events that she sees as she creates elaborate sugar confections for the court’s banquets and festivals. Anne blames Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Spain, for much of her trouble. A devout Catholic, Catherine refused to divorce Henry when he wanted to marry Anne and sire an heir. Initially reluctant to divorce a popular queen and offend Spain, Henry dragged his feet. But using guile and argument, and spending seven years in a legal limbo—she didn’t marry until she was 32—Anne successfully persuaded Henry to act. Defying the pope, he made himself head of the Church and beheaded all those clergy and statesmen, including the famous Thomas More, who opposed him. Anne was triumphant, but not for long. Now, showing little introspection, she has no sorrow for Catherine or for her daughter Princess Mary, but merely recalls her brief happiness and then her downfall. Lucy notes that the people disliked Anne, disapproved of the marriage, and were angry with Henry’s treatment of Catherine. Lucy also recalls, sadly, how she herself fell in love with Mark Smeaton, a court musician, who, in love with Anne, paid dearly for his declaration of affection to her.
A lively reminder of the perils of marrying kings and princes, however glam the bride.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-059157-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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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