Tantalizing but ultimately tepid.
Port-swilling sleuth Lady Emily Ashton embroils herself in an international intrigue that might just start World War I two decades early.
In the third of Alexander’s series (A Poisoned Season, 2007, etc.), Lord Fortescue, a powerful advisor to Queen Victoria, invites Emily and friends to a hunting party at his country house, apparently for the sole purpose of insulting them all weekend. Too soon, a major source of suspense—wondering when Fortescue’s guests will storm out en masse—is dispelled by someone putting a bullet through the host’s head. Although Fortescue had dirt on nearly everyone in England, the most immediate suspect is his former political protégé, Robert Brandon, husband of Emily’s dear friend Ivy. Clapped in Newgate prison, Robert begs Emily to find the real killer. Fortescue had received death threats from Vienna, he reveals. Fortunately for Emily’s vast wardrobe, the Waltz season is in full lilt there, so it’s all aboard the Orient Express. Accompanying our redoubtable amateur detective are her childhood friend and would-be lover Jeremy, Duke of Bainbridge, and her French copine Cécile, herself a pal of Austria’s bereaved empress Sissi, who’s mourning her son’s death in a supposed suicide pact. Once in snowy Vienna, Emily befriends a struggling artist who leads her to Gustav Schröder, an anarchist who knows of Fortescue’s nefarious plot to lead England into war with Germany by fomenting a bombing during the Kaiser’s visit to Vienna. Emily’s betrothed Colin, often absent on clandestine spying missions, stops by occasionally to kiss her soulfully and commiserate about their delayed nuptials, postponed by Emily’s mother until Queen Victoria can fit them into her social calendar. Emily dodges Harrison, a sinister cohort of Fortescue’s who leaves bullets in her hotel room, purse, favorite cafe, etc., just to show he can. The convoluted plot verges on impenetrable, and rich, cosseted Emily remains a heroine whose mettle is in serious need of testing.
Tantalizing but ultimately tepid.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-117422-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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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