Deft, authoritative biographical fiction.
The brief reign of a reluctant queen.
In the third volume of her six-novel series on the unfortunate wives of Henry VIII, Weir (Anne Boleyn, A King’s Obsession, 2017, etc.) offers a dramatic and empathic portrait of Jane Seymour, horrified witness to the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn and to the “seismic changes...taking place in the English Church.” As a teenager, Jane pleads for permission to become a nun, much to her parents’ dismay: They want her to make an astute marriage that will propel the family up the social ladder. Although they eventually give in, Jane finally wavers in her commitment to the religious life; and at the age of 19, through the ministrations of a family friend, she leaves Wulfhall, the Seymour homestead, to become one of 30 maids of honor to Katherine of Aragon. Quiet, diffident, “whitely pale” (Weir speculates that she may have been anemic), Jane has little confidence that she will ever attract a suitor. She grows devoted to the maternal Katherine, despondent at Henry’s cruel treatment of the woman she insists is the only true queen. As Henry exiles Katherine to one residence and another, Jane stays with her until the maids of honor are drastically reduced and Jane is forced to attend Lady Anne at court. “I hate her and all she stands for!” Jane weeps. Much of the novel reprises events from the first two volumes: Katherine’s exile and death; Henry’s passionate determination to marry Anne; the birth of their only living child, Elizabeth; the stillbirths of 2 sons and miscarriage of another; and accusations of infidelity and treason that led to Anne’s beheading—a violent end that haunts Jane. Weir portrays Jane as determinedly virtuous, giving in to Henry’s passion only after she has fallen in love with him and is assured that he means to marry her. Historical sources persuade Weir that Jane was a “humane and sympathetic personality.” Henry ardently professes his adoration, overcome with joy when she produces the son he desperately desires. Weeks later, powerless to save her, he watches her die.
Deft, authoritative biographical fiction.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-96654-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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