Clearly, Keneally’s sympathies lie firmly with Napoleon and the Balcombes, as will the reader’s.
Napoleon’s last exile on the island of St. Helena as related by a British teenager who befriended him.
First, we witness the painful death of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose suffering is raised to the level of punishment by the grisly ministrations of drunken and or/quack physicians. The suspense does not lie in what happens to Napoleon but in how he gets to this pass. That is a story told with as much meandering as St. Helena’s mountain roads by Betsy Balcombe, teenage younger daughter of William Balcombe, who's employed by the East India Company as a provisioner of goods on the island. When he's first brought to St. Helena, Napoleon, known variously according to one’s patriotic bent as the Ogre, OGF (Our Great Friend), the Emperor, or the General, is kept under very commodious house arrest in a guesthouse of the Balcombe residence, the Briars. There, an affinity grows between him and Betsy, nurtured by reciprocal childish pranks and a mutual interest in horsemanship. With a small French entourage and a brimming larder supplied by the East India Company, Napoleon maintains a semblance of court life. The plot drags, though, as the book details Betsy’s growing pains. Gradually she becomes aware of male suitors and also of her superior attractiveness vis-à-vis her long-suffering older sister, Jane. Her incipient womanhood threatens her cherished identity as a hellion, and she’s disillusioned when a resentful admirer tells her that Napoleon was overheard extolling her feminine charms. There are far deeper disillusionments and betrayals to come. St. Helena’s new British governor, Sir Hudson Lowe (in “Name and Nature,” as he is dubbed by Betsy) arrives determined to make sure that Napoleon’s exile more closely resembles jail. The strictures he places on the emperor and his ruinous allegations against William Balcombe for befriending him bring about the novel’s dispiriting and attenuated denouement. The faux regency prose is convincing without being unduly daunting.
Clearly, Keneally’s sympathies lie firmly with Napoleon and the Balcombes, as will the reader’s.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2842-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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