The book flirts with spiritual themes and with the idea that the divide between this life and the next may be permeable. But...
Master magician Harry Houdini has proved an endless source of fascination to writers and filmmakers. This debut novel shifts the focus to his strong-willed wife, Bess, drawing on real events but conjuring a fanciful end to their long marriage.
The two meet as young, struggling performers in Coney Island—Harry performing magic tricks, Bess singing with a female troupe. They marry and endure a hardscrabble life till Harry’s daring, ingenious stunts start to attract international attention. Intercut with the story of Harry’s rise to stardom is a second narrative tracing Bess’ adventures and misadventures after her husband’s mysterious death in 1926. Insisting that he promised, on his deathbed, to communicate with her from beyond the grave, Bess falls prey to scheming mediums claiming to relay his messages. Realizing she’s being duped, Bess begins to look elsewhere for Harry’s presence. She finds coded messages and joins forces with a young photographer who proves crucial to her quest. Unfortunately, this part of the book—which abruptly departs from the historical record—comes off as a little silly, with a Nancy Drew–like quality to it. Throughout, the period details are rich, and it’s fun to keep company with the Houdinis as they mingle with Jack London, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and other celebrities of the era. And who wouldn’t want to be a fly on the wall at the magicians’ salon that Bess—childless and longing for something to call her own—opens in Manhattan?
The book flirts with spiritual themes and with the idea that the divide between this life and the next may be permeable. But Houdini was, in the end, a down-to-earth kind of guy, and one can’t help but wonder what he would have made of the otherworldly turns in this sweet if not quite satisfying novel.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1090-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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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