A pleasant coming-of-age tale with well-developed main characters.
A young Canadian woman in the 1920s learns about herself as she gets her first job in Williams’ historical novel.
In 1927 Vancouver, 17-year-old Clara Wilson, who’s still mourning the death of her mother five years prior, finds out quite suddenly that she, her father, and her slightly older sister, Louisa, are about to be evicted. She decides to go apply for a job at the Hotel Hamilton, a luxury hotel set to open the next month, and Louisa tags along against Clara’s wishes. As Clara fills out an application, she meets a spoiled young woman named Jane Morgan. All three young women make it through the application process to train to be maids. It turns out that snobbish Jane turned down the suitor that her parents picked for her, so she’s working in order to avoid being shipped off to England to live with an elderly relative. Clara sympathizes, but Jane’s privilege and laziness get on her nerves and nearly sabotage a test they must pass together. Clara’s afraid to complain to those in charge, as Jane’s uncle knows the hotel’s owner. However, when Jane shifts blame for her own mistakes onto Clara, the latter panics and acts in ways that may cost her the job she so desperately wants. The sisters also must deal with their father’s heavy drinking and unemployment and have only a month to cover their outstanding rent. Williams’ depiction of the complexity of the often tense relationship between the sisters is the highlight of the novel as a whole. Clara’s interactions with Louisa, an aspiring actress, are frequently fraught, as Clara feels obligated to watch out for her sibling but is jealous of her beauty and her seeming ease with navigating the world around her. They frequently antagonize each other but also help each other out. There are some nice period details throughout the novel, too, including bits of 1920s slang and headlines about Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight in the Spirit of St. Louis. The story can be slow in spots, bogged down by unnecessary detail, but it has a satisfying ending.
A pleasant coming-of-age tale with well-developed main characters.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-989144-16-9
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Rippling Effects
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
Who was Shakespeare?
Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593497210
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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