Excellent, descriptive storytelling rooted in history and legend.
A novel explores the life of Lady Godiva and the tale of her famous ride through Coventry, England.
Godgyfu, a young woman who will eventually be known as Lady Godiva, is on her deathbed in Coventry in 1028. As she is being given last rites, she prays to St. Osburh, promising to dedicate her life to the holy figure if she survives. Later, in 1041, Godgyfu lives in Coventry and is married to Earl Leofric. She spends much of her time praising the Christian God and overseeing the construction of a new abbey for Benedictine monks. Godgyfu is also relentlessly pursued by Thomas, a Benedictine novice, who believes she is the manifestation of the pagan goddess Rhiannon. As she gets to know him, Godgyfu finds her sexual desire newly awakened by Thomas and falls in love with him. Leofric has also discovered a new sexual proclivity of his own that entails voyeurism and exhibitionism. When he catches Thomas spying on Godgyfu bathing one day, Leofric is offended—but it also ignites a spark inside him. The two men reach an agreement: Thomas is permitted to keep watching and meeting with Godgyfu. His mission is to show her the goddess within her, culminating in her fabled naked horse ride. In this swiftly paced tale, Cevasco deftly blends the Lady Godiva legend with Middle Ages history. This is particularly evidenced in Leofric’s dealings with the English monarchy as well as in the brutality highlighted in various scenes. Readers uninterested in medieval politics and Old English spellings will still find plenty to savor here. Thomas may be a slimeball cloaked in the attractive guise of goddess worship and herbalism, but moments between him and Godgyfu remain thrilling, mostly due to the overwhelming nature of her desire. Moreover, Godgyfu is an engaging, driven character who has no issues with expressing herself, whether encouraging her husband to speak to the king about taxes or being proactive in her lust for Thomas. Later, looking at Leofric, a world-weary Godgyfu comes to a sage realization: “She could not help but wonder why…she had ever felt she’d needed” men in her life “to make herself whole. She was stronger than any one of them and now thought of them all as sorry, almost laughable oafs.”
Excellent, descriptive storytelling rooted in history and legend.Pub Date: April 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-59021-714-6
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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