Occasionally melodramatic, sometimes grandiloquent; those who liked Wouk’s War and Remembrance will certainly enjoy this...
Continuing Smith’s Courtney family epic (Assegai, 2009, etc.), this novel focuses on big-game hunter Leon and his daughter, Saffron, during the post–World War I era, first on their great Kenya estate, Lusima, and then as they move toward the bloody fray that became World War II.
It’s an action-packed affair beginning in Africa with coltish young Saffron outdoing the boys on horseback, then attacking Saint Moritz’s men-only Cresta Run skeleton-racing course, and ending with her manning a Vickers gun to protect the Greek nation’s gold bullion reserves. The tale regularly shifts to Leon, too, but Saffron’s adventures extend the Courtney legend, including when she falls in love with an "immediate, instinctive, animal passion" worthy of her clan. The attitude throughout is Old World British colonial, as is the dialogue. There’s more than one reference to "the local peasantry." Saffron attends school in South Africa and Oxford. There she makes German friends who will lead to connections regarding her father’s fortune and makes a disconcerting reacquaintance with his old enemies, the von Meerbach dynasty. As this story ends, Saffron is spotted by a mysterious older gentlemen connected to Britain’s Special Operations Executive, while the man who stirred her animal passion is witness to the Babi Yar massacre. Meanwhile, Leon’s been forced to helm the family's Cairo-based business, which is threatened by brother Frank’s worship of Oswald Mosley. With cameo appearances by the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hitler, and Reinhard Heydrich and traveling everyplace from the Ritz in London to a Masai village, the story is wonderfully plotted, woven together by quick but not disconcerting cinematic shifts from scene to scene in a narrative that keeps the pages turning.
Occasionally melodramatic, sometimes grandiloquent; those who liked Wouk’s War and Remembrance will certainly enjoy this Smith saga.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-227649-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
IN THE NEWS
An ambitious look at how women’s roles have changed—and stayed the same—over the last 70 years.
A sprawling story about two sisters growing up, apart, and back together.
Jo and Bethie Kaufman may be sisters, but they don’t have much else in common. As young girls in the 1950s, Jo is a tomboy who’s uninterested in clothes while Bethie is the “pretty one” who loves to dress up. When their father dies unexpectedly, the Kaufman daughters and their mother, Sarah, suddenly have to learn how to take care of themselves at a time when women have few options. Jo, who realizes early on that she’s attracted to girls, knows that it will be difficult for her to ever truly be herself in a world that doesn’t understand her. Meanwhile, Bethie struggles with her appearance, using food to handle her difficult emotions. The names Jo and Beth aren’t all that Weiner (Hungry Heart, 2016, etc.) borrows from Little Women; she also uses a similar episodic structure to showcase important moments of the sisters’ lives as she follows them from girlhood to old age. They experience the civil rights movement, protests, sexual assault, drugs, sex, and marriage, all while dealing with their own personal demons. Although men are present in both women's lives, female relationships take center stage. Jo and Bethie are defined not by their relationships with husbands or boyfriends, but by their complex and challenging relationships with their mother, daughters, friends, lovers, and, ultimately, each other. Weiner resists giving either sister an easy, tidy ending; their sorrows are the kind that many women, especially those of their generation, have had to face. The story ends as Hillary Clinton runs for president, a poignant reminder of both the strides women have made since the 1950s and the barriers that still hold them back.
An ambitious look at how women’s roles have changed—and stayed the same—over the last 70 years.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3348-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
While Liv’s more pedestrian story is less romantic than Sophie’s and far less nuanced, Moyes is a born storyteller who makes...
The newest novel by Moyes (Me Before You, 2012, etc.) shares its title with a fictional painting that serves as catalyst in linking two love stories, one set in occupied France during World War I, the other in 21st-century London.
In a French village in 1916, Sophie is helping the family while her husband, Édouard, an artist who studied with Matisse, is off fighting. Sophie’s pluck in standing up to the new German kommandant in the village draws his interest. An art lover, he also notices Édouard's portrait of Sophie, which captures her essence (and the kommandant's adoration). Arranging to dine regularly at Sophie’s inn with his men, he begins a cat-and-mouse courtship. She resists. But learning that Édouard is being held in a particularly harsh “reprisal” camp, she must decide what she will sacrifice for Édouard’s freedom. The rich portrayals of Sophie, her family and neighbors hauntingly capture wartime’s gray morality. Cut to 2006 and a different moral puzzle. Thirty-two-year-old widow Liv has been struggling financially and emotionally since her husband David’s sudden death. She meets Paul in a bar after her purse is stolen. The divorced father is the first man she’s been drawn to since she was widowed. They spend a glorious night together, but after noticing Édouard's portrait of Sophie on Liv’s wall, he rushes away with no explanation. In fact, Paul is as smitten as Liv, but his career is finding and returning stolen art to the rightful owners. Usually the artwork was confiscated by Germans during World War II, not WWI, but Édouard's descendants recently hired him to find this very painting. Liv is not about to part with it; David bought it on their honeymoon because the portrait reminded him of Liv. In love, Liv and Paul soon find themselves on opposite sides of a legal battle.
While Liv’s more pedestrian story is less romantic than Sophie’s and far less nuanced, Moyes is a born storyteller who makes it impossible not to care about her heroines.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-670-02661-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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