Sure to fascinate even readers who don’t know “up-the-town” from “down-the-town.”
In Swerling’s fourth Old New York novel (City of Glory, 2007, etc.), the Devreys and the Turners forge new alliances as their city and their rivalry evolve.
It’s 1833 and Samuel Devrey has made an advantageous marriage with beautiful heiress Carolina Randolf. But his heart belongs to Mei-Hua, whom he married three years earlier in a Chinese ceremony not recognized under New York law. Samuel bought Mei-Hua as a toddler from her father, a river pirate in Canton, and had her brought up in New York as a Chinese lady, complete with musical training and, most important to Sam, bound feet. Carolina disgusts him, mainly because of her intact feet. When he’s not in Mei-Hua’s bower in China Village on Cherry Street, where wily nursemaid Ah Chee guards her, Sam plots to regain control of Devrey Shipping (lost by his profligate father Lansing) by building the world’s fastest clipper ship and wresting the China trade, including opium, from John Jacob Astor. Meanwhile, surgeon Nick Turner proves himself ahead of the times by performing painless operations using ether and advocating that medical staff wash their hands. Appalled by the squalid conditions at Bellevue Hospital, Nick battles its corrupt administration to secure proper care for patients, aided by his saintly cousin Manon, a nurse. To prevent Sam from gaining control of Carolina’s inheritance, her father Wilbur alters his estate plan; after he dies, the ruined Sam retreats to Cherry Street and succumbs to opium addiction. Carolina sets up housekeeping with secret soul mate Nick, takes over Devrey Shipping and realizes Sam’s dreams with the speedy and profitable clipper Hell Witch. A gangster usurps Sam’s power in China Village, and Mei Lin, his daughter with Mei-Hua, must make a terrible choice to protect her mother. Avoiding a previous penchant for plot-slowing chunks of exposition, Swerling skillfully interweaves background information about the territorial and socioeconomic transformation of Gotham’s landscape.
Sure to fascinate even readers who don’t know “up-the-town” from “down-the-town.”Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4921-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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