Aspire to the heights of Name of the Rose it doth, but this confection feels like a blend of genre romance and a forgotten...
Let loose thy jerkins and bodices: this long, lax, chatty first novel has a medieval tale to spin and an unlikely hero and heroine with which to spin it.
Ladies get lonely once their husbands are slain in knightly duels across the sea. But never fear: for the lonely lady, Kathryn, there’s a dwarf, an artist, a cleric, and a whole mess of intrigue to help her pass the time. The artist in question, the center of the tale, is an illuminator of manuscripts who has a full-time gig working for the local episcopate. But, just as there “was some what thought Holy Church had too much property,” our illuminator, Finn, has been off to the wars in France and, in the autumn of his years, has little patience with authority, which is why Oxford don John Wycliffe’s notion that there should be a Bible accessible to the laity seems a good one indeed. For his part, Wycliffe has the requisite soul-searching bouts over the project: “Could it be pride, intellectual arrogance, and not God, that called him to such a gargantuan task?” Maybe, but it could also be the endless machinations of John of Gaunt, everyone’s favorite Lancastrian, that push Wycliffe and his illuminator onward. Enter the clerical police and inquisitors, who become ever more interested once one of their number turns up dead. The premise is intriguing, but Vantrease’s tale has a by-the-numbers feel to it, with set pieces, set characters, and set descriptions (among them detailed views of the sweat-drenched, well-formed bosoms of the local nobility) filling her pages. As her story develops, Vantrease works in some promising twists, including one that speaks to the history of “hidden Jews” in medieval Europe, but in the end the story is overlong and underdone.
Aspire to the heights of Name of the Rose it doth, but this confection feels like a blend of genre romance and a forgotten episode of Brother Caedfael.Pub Date: March 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33191-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
