A measured but underdeveloped historical novel of love and war.
In the first in a series of novels set during medieval times, a teenager bears witness to the life and death of Joan of Arc.
Echols tells a tale set in 1429 that both humanizes “Jeanne the Maid” and introduces Felise, a fictional 15-year-old girlin northern France whose life becomes caught up in the Hundred Years’ War. Felise is an apprentice scribe who runs away from home in 1429 when faced with the possibility of an unwanted arranged marriage and the threat of being sold into slavery, due to her absent merchant father’s debts. Inspired by stories she’s heard of Jeanne d’Arc, she dresses as a boy and sneaks out of the town of Troyes. She’s helped by Jeanne herself, who, after her victory at Orléans against the English is trying to get the Dauphin, Charles, crowned king of France. Felise hides from her pursuers, follows Jeanne and her army, and eventually takes a position helping the army’s doctors; she also learns something unexpected about her father. Along the way, Felise witnesses the coronation of Charles VII at Reims and even falls in love. In this series-starter that takes place over less than a year, Echols dramatically introduces the feisty and noble Felise. Along the way, she places her protagonist in positions to witness important events in a plausible manner and effectively demonstrates the dangers that women faced at the time. She presents the story, however, as a sort of chronicle from Felise’s perspective: “I had loved everything about being a scribe, from sharpening my quill to filling the inkhorns and above all copying books with my own hand.” This is consistent with her apprenticeship, to be sure, but it limits readers’ ability to get to know other characters, who are portrayed relatively flatly. Echols herself is far more concerned with recording what happened than she is in offering a more thorough exploration of the era, which might have made the work more engaging.
A measured but underdeveloped historical novel of love and war.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 978-1647425432
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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