Subtle and low-key, Miller’s debut coolly appraises the poet while fully inhabiting the woman in his shadow.
An atmospheric novel conjures up Georgie Hyde-Lees, the woman whose automatic writing is credited with enabling poet W.B. Yeats’ late work, a clever, rational, sympathetic figure in her own right.
Indulged by her alcoholic father and disapproved of by her sterner mother, Georgie emerges, as Miller’s debut opens, as an independent-minded, questioning young woman living in London in a pre-feminist era. It’s 1916, and, keen to help with the war effort, Georgie has taken on a menial hospital job, tending to wounded officers, that comes with the useful benefit of lodgings that liberate her from her mother’s home while also allowing her to pursue her interest in spiritualism and see friends at will. These friends include the poets Ezra Pound, who will marry Georgie’s best friend, and W.B. Yeats, an Irishman twice her age who shares her interest in mediums and séances and will introduce her to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. An unspoken moment of intensity between Yeats and Georgie leads to an assumption that they will marry, yet Yeats seems distant and is rumored to still be seeking a marriage with the woman he has pursued for decades, Maude Gonne. Miller draws an empathetic—if loosely paced—portrait of Georgie, a young woman seeking certitude and intellectual satisfaction in a confusing landscape of war, mysticism, supposed intellectuals, and affairs of the heart. The latter are complicated by the attentions of one of the wounded officers and the comments of a medium who suggests Yeats has three possible women to choose from. Meeting that third woman—Iseult Gonne, Maude’s daughter—at one of Yeats’ parties, Georgie gains clarity on several matters, including her own naiveté, and flees London. But neither the spirits nor the menfolk have quite finished with her.
Subtle and low-key, Miller’s debut coolly appraises the poet while fully inhabiting the woman in his shadow.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947793-76-7
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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