A richly detailed rendering of the familiar Tudor drama.
A notorious Tudor queen is sympathetically imagined.
Weir (Katherine of Aragon, 2016, etc.), prolific Tudor historian, biographer, and novelist, offers the second volume in her fictional series about Henry VIII’s six wives, focusing on the outspoken, doomed Anne Boleyn. Anne is certainly the most famous of those unfortunate women and, as Weir admits in an afterword, the least knowable. While Katherine of Aragon left abundant letters, Anne did not, and testimony about her comes mainly from an ambassador to the court who was hostile to her. Weir brings considerable expertise to her portrait of Anne as “a flawed but very human heroine, a woman of great ambition, idealism and courage.” Because Anne spent formative years at the French court, where feminist ideas were debated, Weir chooses to see her as an early feminist, repulsed by the widespread incidence of rape in the royal courts of France and England. Henry raped Anne’s married sister, Mary, who continued an affair with him, ending up pregnant and cast aside; and even Anne’s beloved brother George confessed, to her shock and disgust, that he “forced widows and deflowered maidens,” inflamed by uncontrollable lust. Weir vividly depicts court life: the hundreds of attendants, the sumptuous pageants and celebrations, and Anne’s amazing gowns and jewels. She reprises the plight of Katherine of Aragon and her daughter, Mary, both of whom Anne fervently wished dead; and she gives ample evidence for England’s resentment of Anne, in and out of court. Despite Weir’s well-informed portrayal of her cast of characters, the novel suffers from its focus on Henry’s machinations to dissolve his marriage to Katherine, a process that took six long years of “unbearably frustrating” and nearly intolerable delays, marked by skirmishes, controversies, and conversations that become repetitive. After the pair are married, Weir deals sensitively with Anne’s increasing desperation as she fails to produce a living son and witnesses the king’s blatant philandering. The plot intensifies once Anne is accused of adultery and treason, culminating in a truly shocking and emotional execution scene.
A richly detailed rendering of the familiar Tudor drama.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-96651-8
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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