An ambitious but disjointed and hyperbolic historical novel.
Two stories separated by millennia unite in the famous buried city of Pompeii in Laudrigan’s novel.
This book is constructed as a narrative within a narrative. In the present day, Titch, a narrator who shares the author’s name, describes his acquisition and painstaking reconstruction and translation of scrolls that were recovered from a villa north of Pompeii. The contents of those scrolls constitute the book’s inner narrative: the life story of a soldier and thief named Mago who lived through several signature events in the reigns of the Roman emperors Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula. This text by Mago is burned and corrupted, making it a nonchronological challenge for Titch; it’s further complicated by Mago’s tendency to skip the narrative around to points over a long span of Roman history, with Titch industriously inserting parenthetical explanations for the many details that Mago mentions. The story, of course, marches inexorably toward the natural disaster that will end Mago’s story forever. Laudrigan’s novel is intriguingly multilayered, and the narrative makes effective use of the one element every reader will already know: the famous eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum nearly 2,000 years ago. The book’s liberal sprinkling of Latin among the historical accounts is likewise engaging. However, its narrative voice comes in a rush of rambling, tangled prose, and readers may often find themselves bewildered: “It is not of your behavior this day I want to inquire, of that I already know,” says one character, going on to elaborate: “It is something of your Gods I wish answered, a piqued considered interest, merely an opinion needed to sate a rapacious curiosity and moreover, something I can get further information at another time.” Such excessive overwriting slows the momentum of the plot as effectively as an eruption of ash.
An ambitious but disjointed and hyperbolic historical novel.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-66290-175-1
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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