An enthusiastic engagement of Austen’s juvenilia that will be of interest to her very devoted fans.
A reimagined version of Jane Austen’s 1790 novella Love and Freindship [sic] complements this partial collection of Austen’s early works.
Andrews’ (The Unforgiving Eye, 2014, etc.) expansion of Austen’s early epistolary tale begins with a new frame story, narrated by a woman named Marianne. In Austen’s original, Marianne only serves as a device to prompt her mother’s friend Laura Lindsay to disgorge a tale of her own bizarre life. Andrews wisely draws Marianne as a fuller character—curious, skeptical, and circumspect—who’d be very much at home in a later Austen novel. (For example, Marianne struggles with doubts about her upcoming marriage.) The story then shifts to the main plot of Austen’s original story, focusing on Laura’s recounting of her youth, starting with her first encounter with her husband, Edward Lindsay. When they meet, Edward is horrified by the idea of marriage to Lady Dorothea, who’s “wealthy and titled” and, worse, meets with his father’s approval. After he and Laura marry instead, their travels take them first to the home of Augustus and Sophia, a young couple who share their devotion to romance and opulence. Laura’s story progresses with absurd coincidences—she meets her never-before-seen grandfather and a few cousins in a single chance encounter—and dramatic turns from which she draws misguided conclusions. Many passages are near verbatim from Austen’s original text, but Andrews’ humor is broader; the expanded tale is peppered with jokes, including one about the house of a family called the MacDonalds, which features “golden arches,” and an allusion to Bridget Jones’s Diary. There are times when this heightened jokiness pays off, as in Laura’s repeated clarification to the widowed Sophia that her own husband lives while “Augustus is still dead.” The rest of the volume consists of Austen’s original text of Love and Freindship and other works of juvenilia. These display Austen’s vacillations between satirical impulses and the psychological observations of her mature writing. However, this section would have benefited from editorial notes; it’s hard not to suspect when reading a long, winking section, for example, on “the art of cutting a slice of cold Beef,” that one is missing a joke.
An enthusiastic engagement of Austen’s juvenilia that will be of interest to her very devoted fans.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Crowood Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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