An enjoyable experiment that almost works.
Three new stories about Uhtred, protagonist of Cornwell’s Last Kingdom series, each preceded by historical background material and followed by recipes.
Uhtred of Bebbanburg looks back as an old man on some of his adventures in the ninth century as Englaland went through its “long and brutal” coalescence into the kingdom of England. At age 8, Uhtred is already hearing his father tell him he is useless if he cannot fight. But the wee lad must also trap eels from the local creek, because his father loves to eat them. When the child is ambushed and robbed of his catch by other children, he must fight his enemy with a wooden sword. The stories are light on plot, serving mostly as vehicles to show what people ate. Cornwell and his collaborator, Suzanne Pollak, who crafted the recipes based on Anglo-Saxon fare, clearly enjoyed themselves researching and writing this unusual hybrid of history, fiction, and cookbook. Pork chops with apples sounds tasty, but do you really, really want a two-page recipe for eel pie? Or for fermented shredded turnip? The historical background chapters offer plenty of interesting nuggets; for example, the fact that people generally drank ale because it was safer than water. Few characters other than Uhtred get much development, but his pungent narration offers plenty of meat. By the time of his reminiscences, he has long since become a confirmed pagan, but he recalls that as a boy he was “scared into a belief in the nailed god because [he] knew no better.” Asked at one point if King Alfred should be declared a saint, he sardonically replies that “as a young man Alfred went through the kitchen maids like a hot seax through butter! He even had a bastard son by one of them”—Uhtred himself. The concept of showing what people ate a thousand years ago is appealing, but adding detailed recipes (for example, “Preheat the oven to 220ºC/425ºF/gas 7” to roast fennel just right) would seem to limit the book’s audience drastically. The stories themselves need to be more eventful and provide greater challenges for Uhtred; the historical background would work better if it were woven into the fiction rather than unloaded in stand-alone sections. That said, Cornwell’s prose is a pleasure to read, and the food facts are fun.
An enjoyable experiment that almost works.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780063219366
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
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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