A heartfelt, if mildly excessive, historical tale about a man with an immortal spirit.
A supernaturally tinged novel of love and longing, set in Civil War–era Louisiana.
De Abreu’s historical tale opens in the beleaguered city of New Orleans in 1862 as it faces the imminent threat of siege and destruction at the hands of Union forces commanded by Commodore David Farragut. To this war-torn place has recently come a young woman named Nabella,who meets and befriends rooming-house owner Eulalie DeMasiliere. The two become close and do their best to comfort each other as each day’s newspapers (reproduced among the novel’s many illustrations) offer grim information. However, they’re intermittently intrigued by their enigmatic neighbor, cabman Valsin Chiasson, who always seems “interested and bored at the same time.” Nabella eagerly awaits the return of the man she considers to be her future husband, Jean Trahan, from the front lines, and as she waits, she must live through Union Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler’s infamous General Order No. 28, which decrees that any New Orleans woman insulting a Union officer can be treated as harshly as a criminal. These experiences are counterbalanced with the deepening story of Valsin, his love for a woman named Marie Louise Gaspard, and most remarkably, the supernatural mystery of his life: the fact that he’s destined to be reincarnated over and over and only dimly recall his previous existences. “Although Valentin had what some may call an average life,” readers are told, “it was as deep as the sea.” The narrative gradually inches forward in time to the present and then the future, with echoes of Valentin at its heart.
One of the signature strengths of de Abreu’s novel is its elaborately detailed evocation of late-19th-century New Orleans at the time of the Civil War—one that’s considerably aided by the author’s decision to illustrate her novel; on almost every page, there are black-and-white photos of old New Orleans locations, facsimiles of period newspapers, and contemporary prints and portraits. The prose can occasionally become labored, as in a detailed description of Nabella’s clothing, which notes her “wine-colored gown gathered and crossed at the bust,” “a garnet choker necklace and earrings she inherited from her mother,” and a “beautiful cream shawl embroidered in multicolored flowers [that] wrapped around her elbows and hung low in back.” Although the author’s storytelling conviction is undeniable, there’s a didactic tenor to the book that is particularly pronounced in the book’s final section, which features questions and reading prompts. They’re clearly intended to provoke book club discussions, but they have the parallel effect of drawing attention to the fact that the story of Nabella and the long, strange saga of Valsin aren’t substantial enough to warrant such back-of-the-textbook analysis. That said, the differences between those two narrative strains—one being standard historical fiction fare, and the other adding fantasy elements in the style of the work of Anne Rice—create an intriguing dynamic that de Abreu handles with some skill, which is helped by her extensive research.
A heartfelt, if mildly excessive, historical tale about a man with an immortal spirit.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Jmfdea Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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