Weighty with period research, but with little narrative payoff.
A sinister French wigmaker plies his trade in late-19th-century Florida: New Zealander Chidgey’s third outing (after The Strength of the Sun, 2002, etc.).
Foundling Lucien Goulet learned his craft in Paris from a perruqier who took him on as an apprentice. Over time, Goulet’s work excelled that of his master, who claimed it as his own—so Goulet murdered him and fled to America. Thus far the tale bears a striking resemblance to Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, which also featured a Parisian foundling with an extraordinary gift who progressed to murder; but Chidgey lacks Süskind’s ability to integrate the lore of a trade with a killer storyline. In 1895, after lying low for a year, Goulet establishes himself as a wigmaker at the spectacular Tampa Bay Hotel, setting for the climax. Parallel plotlines focus on Marion Unger, a young American widow with gorgeous white-blond hair, and Rafael Méndez, a Cuban teenager and apprentice cigar-maker. It’s hair, of course, that brings them together by maddeningly slow degrees. Marion commissions a commemorative hair bracelet from Goulet, who later hires Rafael to scour refuse for hair clippings. When Marion catches him going through her trash, it’s not exactly meeting cute, but she’s gracious, and Rafael develops a serious crush on her. Unfortunately, readers are constantly drawn away from this welcome romantic interest by Goulet’s pronouncements on the hair business and the stupidity of women. When Marion asks for a “transformation,” he’s ecstatic; she means a few extra curls, but Goulet, exhibiting a carnal joy in hair of such delicacy, produces a massive wig, even kidnapping a little girl to harvest more white-blond hair. Marion rejects the wig. Will this fire up Goulet’s killer instincts? In the event, the close is more farcical than deadly.
Weighty with period research, but with little narrative payoff.Pub Date: May 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-6971-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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