Deserves front-runner status in the saturated field of Austen fan-fiction and film.
A worthy attempt to augment Jane Austen’s love life.
Austen’s short life is well documented by her surviving letters—except for the period 1809 through 1812, which preceded publication of her first novel, Sense and Sensibility. James re-imagines this time in the form of a “lost memoir” discovered in an attic chest, along with a gold-and-ruby ring. The “missing years” are emotionally and financially fraught for Jane. There’s her first marriage proposal, from boorish, stammering Harris, the son and heir to the Bigg-Wither country estate. She accepts, seeing a means of procuring her mother’s and sisters’ security, but reneges the next day. Upon her father’s death, Jane and the other distaff Austens must vacate their family home. The women, dependent on male relatives, now exist on the fringes of genteel respectability. While traveling with her brother Henry, Jane meets Frederick Ashford, son of a baronet and heir to a huge fortune, with a stately home to match. Jane and winsome 34-year-old Frederick share a love of literature, a proclivity for intellectual discourse and a sense of humor. Dare she hope that he finds her enthralling despite her limited wardrobe, relatively plain face and age verging on intractable spinsterhood—32? She dares. He’s called away suddenly, but the two meet again for a three-week idyll of diffident courtship. He’s on the verge of a declaration when meddlesome friends interrupt. Later, Jane learns, to her horror, that Frederick is engaged to a 17-year-old heiress, Isabella. Why did he allow Jane to cherish false hopes? She staunchly refuses his letters. Finally, Frederick confronts Jane at a London society party and reveals that his engagement was parentally dictated. There’s hope—Isabella wants out. Suspense builds, and it’s a tribute to the world James creates that readers will anxiously root for Jane to find true love and wealth even though we know it never happened.
Deserves front-runner status in the saturated field of Austen fan-fiction and film.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-134142-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avon A/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
