Painstaking reconstruction of a period with great contemporary relevance, marred by one-note characters and the use of...
Final installment in a historical trilogy (A Singular Hostage, 2002, etc.) setting a feisty English heroine against a backdrop of political upheaval in Victorian-era India and Afghanistan.
In March 1841, Mariana Givens settles in a British fort north of Kabul with her Aunt Claire and Uncle Adrian, a colonial intelligence officer. Surrounded by military and government officials’ families, Mariana hides the fact that she is still married to Hassan Ali Khan, a Punjabi Muslim courtier whose household in Lahore, India, she fled several weeks earlier. After overhearing him discuss an Englishman’s attempt to assassinate the new maharajah, she wrongly accused Hassan of plotting to kill her aunt and uncle, their British traveling companions, perhaps even herself. Demanding a divorce, Mariana bolted, but she soon rues her hotheadedness. She misses Hassan and her four-year-old stepson Saboor, a pint-sized diviner who remains in Lahore with his father and grandfather, a famed Sufi mystic. Receiving no response from Hassan to her apologetic letters, Mariana reluctantly accepts the renewed attentions of an English lieutenant but secretly consults a Kabul soothsayer about her romantic destiny. She also observes the mounting unrest of local tribesmen under Shah Shuja, installed in 1839 by British forces after they ousted the Afghan king. As warfare erupts, Mariana finds her loyalties divided; she eventually seeks asylum from a fierce chieftain allied with the deposed king’s son. Pluck, Qur’anic verse, invocations of Allah’s blessings and Saboor’s otherworldly powers guide her back to Hassan. Mariana passionately defends Islam and its practitioners against the prejudices of the “self-satisfied, overstuffed people” who comprise the worst of her peers, but the novel never explores the implications of having as its protagonist a white adventuress who is preternaturally understanding of native customs.
Painstaking reconstruction of a period with great contemporary relevance, marred by one-note characters and the use of heavy-handed shtick such as dreams to advance the plot.Pub Date: April 3, 2007
ISBN: 0-553-38178-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
A moody exploration of bleak wartime Britain.
Healey looks back fondly at the tradition of spooky English country-house fiction while adding a few twists of her own.
With more than a few nods to Jane Eyre and Rebecca, this debut novel throws an awkward but stalwart heroine into a decaying house with history and mystery to spare. Friendless Hetty Cartright has found a home working among the stuffed specimens at a major natural history museum in London. When, in 1939, the museum decides to farm out its collection to houses in the countryside in order to avoid their destruction in the anticipated bombing of the city, Hetty is assigned to guard the stuffed mammals in their temporary home at Lockwood Manor. The decaying manor, ruled by the imperious and lascivious Lord Lockwood, has “four floors, six flights of stairs, and ninety-two rooms,” some with resident ghosts, and Hetty soon has her hands full attempting to protect the animals, some of which disappear and many of which she finds in disconcerting new spots. Scorned by the household staff, Hetty finds an ally in Lord Lockwood's sensitive, unstable daughter, Lucy, who narrates the portions of the novel that Hetty doesn't. As the two become closer and face their individual fears and insecurities, the peril of the house amps up, culminating in a disastrous party. While Healey sometimes lays on the atmospheric menace with a heavy hand, especially considering how light on action the novel actually is, and though she ties up her plot threads in a few hasty pages, her depictions of the historical period and of the dread of anticipating full-scale war are vivid. The animals, frozen in place and unable to defend themselves either against the encroaching Germans or the more immediate dangers of the live animals and insects that want to devour them, mirror the plight of the women caught in Lockwood Manor.
A moody exploration of bleak wartime Britain.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-358-10640-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
A predictable romance tempers the energy of this tale about the healing powers of love.
Having escaped from a train headed to Auschwitz, Vera and Edith, two young Hungarian women, mourn their parents as well as Edith’s fiance, all likely lost to the Holocaust. Can they forge new lives in the postwar world?
After surviving the war by working on a farm, Vera and Edith realize their hometown of Budapest holds little promise. Fortuitously, a kind American officer sends them to Naples with a letter recommending Vera to the embassy. Once there, Vera, who is fluent in five languages, readily secures a job as secretary to Capt. Anton Wight, an American officer at the embassy. She’s intent upon taking care of Edith, who’s looking for male attention, which she finds with Marcus, a photographer ready to sweep her away dancing and maybe into social ruin. But it’s Vera who falls in love first, with the dashing Capt. Wight, who treats her to dinner dates and gifts. Although Vera tells Anton about her experiences during the war, including her guilt over surviving while her family presumably perished in the gas chambers, her attraction to him quickly outweighs any lingering trauma. However, Anton’s struggles with his own past derail their romance, plunging Vera into more heartache as her path traverses the globe. The romance between Vera and Capt. Wight is, unfortunately, much too easy, beginning with its inevitable whirlwind courtship. Publishing for the first time under her birth name, Abriel (Christmas in Vermont, 2019, etc., written as Anita Hughes) was inspired by her mother's life, and she deftly sketches the postwar world from Naples to Venezuela and Australia, with attention paid to the changed architectural and emotional landscapes. The rubble of bombed cities, the blank map of lost relatives, and the uncertainty of day-to-day survival outline the anguish of the lost generation.
A predictable romance tempers the energy of this tale about the healing powers of love.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2297-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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