This fuzzy outline for a period melodrama is likely to disappoint admirers of Rayfiel’s Eve trilogy.
Skeletons rattle in the closet, while an ancient aristocrat struggles to understand a new generation.
William, the 86-year-old Seventh Earl of Upton, is in poor health. His grandson Seabold, a recent arrival at Upton Hall in the English countryside, has suggested writing a diary as good therapy, so this wisp of a novel is in diary format. The old Victorian fears his impecunious grandson, his last surviving relative, is a parasite, and his suspicions are deepened when Seabold invites two girls, daughters of a tenant farmer, to stay at the Hall. As he tries to deal with the problem, William is bombarded by lurid memories. His sister Angela was deflowered by their father before the old boy went mad and had to be shackled. The madness was hereditary. To prevent it passing to William, his mother shopped around for another father; his sire was one of three servants, meaning the Earl is a bastard. Rayfiel’s fifth novel displays the same Gothic excess as his first (Split-Levels, 1994), but not in any detail—these are shards of memory. And there are scarcely any memories at all of his much younger wife Alice or his daughter Miranda, who died giving birth to Seabold. Meanwhile, there are eye-popping revelations in the present. Seabold’s lover is not pretty Kate, the farmer’s daughter, but strapping Lucas Dalrymple, a fellow aristocrat from their Oxford days who William, too clever by half, has inadvertently brought to the Hall. (He had his own same-sex experience when, as a nine-year-old, he was seduced by Angela’s suitor Lord Albemarle.) It’s a mess, but one William will not sort out, for his health is failing rapidly and his thoughts are turning to the nightshade that Cook has ready for him. She will perform the mercy killing he denied his own mother.
This fuzzy outline for a period melodrama is likely to disappoint admirers of Rayfiel’s Eve trilogy.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-57962-201-5
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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