The Scotch-taped plot and dull romance will be irrelevant to those who want to play with numerology, spiritualism and...
The bestselling British author of guides to charms, spells and other white magic makes her fiction debut with a religious caper about a young woman who receives a transplanted heart—and a mysterious legacy from Elizabethan alchemists.
Having contracted a rare heart-wasting disease, beautiful TV producer Lucy King receives a new heart from Will Stafford after his untimely death in a motorcycle mishap that may not have been an accident. Shortly before his death, Will walked the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral and began to understand the meaning of the mysterious key and collection of riddles he’d inherited from his mother, a bequest usually handed from mother to daughter. The key once belonged to Elizabeth I’s advisor John Dee, an alchemist, Rosicrucian and follower of a heretical version of Christianity. Soon Lucy, who feels a strange bond with Will, begins a romance with his handsome brother Alex, who happens to be one of her doctors. While boating down the Thames on Halloween, they pass through a time warp and briefly cross paths with Dee, who quotes the same riddle Will left behind. Meanwhile Will’s former girlfriend has begun to date a Stafford cousin who has conveniently popped up from America. Handsome but creepy Calvin is mixed up with powerful, politically connected Christian fundamentalist Fitzalan Walters. Believing Dee’s key and manuscript can lead him into The Rapture, Walters will stop at nothing to obtain them. In contrast to Walters’s dastardly fundamentalism, Lucy and Alex study the papers for an understanding of Dee’s complex philosophy and teachings. They realize their romance is foretold, a case of destiny and the triumph of faith and pure love. Sure there’s a kidnapping and some pretty hot sex, but Lucy, Alex and their friends are mostly excited by each others’ long-winded explanations of their research.
The Scotch-taped plot and dull romance will be irrelevant to those who want to play with numerology, spiritualism and questions of Christian intrigue.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8460-5
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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
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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