Goodman’s sweeping page turner is at once historical and modern, intimate and epic, personal and powerful.
A 16th-century noblewoman is stranded on a desert island. How will she survive—and thrive?
In an author’s note following her gripping new novel, Goodman explains that the story originated when, in a children’s book about Jacques Cartier, she encountered an aside about one of the explorer’s acquaintances: “In 1542, a nobleman named Jean-François Roberval sailed separately with colonists to meet with Cartier in what is now called Canada,” she recalls learning. “Roberval brought along his young ward, Marguerite de la Rocque, who annoyed him by having an affair aboard ship. Roberval marooned Marguerite and her lover on an island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence where she managed to survive for more than two years while fighting off polar bears.” Fascinated by this tidbit, Goodman set out to write her version of Marguerite’s story, based on historical accounts. In it, we meet Marguerite, wealthy and landed but orphaned by age 3, alone in the world but for her pious, loving, and loyal nurse, Damienne. As Marguerite grows, her rarely present guardian, Roberval, incrementally cashes in her property and future for his own benefit. Eventually, the cruel man sets sail to claim new territory for the King and takes along terrified Marguerite and Damienne, presumably intending to claim Marguerite for himself. Aboard ship, Marguerite falls in love with Roberval’s secretary, infuriating Roberval and sealing their fate. The author charts Marguerite’s journey from nobly born naïf, to steely survivor, to patron of the poor. Setting Marguerite’s story of love and loss against snippets from Anne of France’s Lessons for My Daughter—advice from the daughter of Louis XI on how to be modest and chaste circa 1517—Goodman underscores the cultural headwinds against which her heroine struggles to achieve autonomy and self-actualization. Goodman writes with fluid beauty, deep empathy, and an emotional undertow that pulls you in and holds you from the first page to the last.
Goodman’s sweeping page turner is at once historical and modern, intimate and epic, personal and powerful.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593730089
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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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