A briskly narrated tale of power and revolution.
A Danish princess becomes a Russian czarina, mother to the last Romanov czar.
In his 10th historical novel, Gortner (The Vatican Princess, 2016, etc.) creates a vibrant portrait of imperial Russia, narrated by the woman at its throbbing center: Maria Feodorovna. The daughter of Denmark’s King Christian IX, Minnie, as she was known, was destined to marry into royalty, just as her older sister, Alix, did when she married Queen Victoria’s son, Bertie. Faced with a marriage to the czarevich, Nicholas, she was surprised to find herself falling in love with “his gentle spirit and noble soul.” But suddenly, he was dying, exacting a promise from Sasha, one of his brothers, to wed Minnie. When Minnie balks at the idea of marrying a man so unlike her beloved Nixa, her mother rebukes her sternly: “Think of everything you can achieve,” not only as “conscience and counsel” for her husband, but also for the good of Denmark. As Maria Feodorovna, she arrives in a nation beset by turmoil and violence. Although her father-in-law, Czar Alexander II, enacted liberal changes, such as abolishing serfdom, Nihilists and anarchists cry for more: “they sow terror in the hope that I’ll either grant reforms or abdicate. Preferably abdicate,” Alexander tells Minnie. “They have no use for a tsar.” While Russian royalty reside in opulent palaces and bedeck themselves in stunning arrays of precious jewels, peasants live in abject poverty. Visiting a Red Cross hospital, Maria is shocked by the “searing display of the plight of the poor.” When Alexander II is assassinated, Sasha emerges as an oppressive ruler, trying to contain bloody dissension. When he dies of illness, he is succeeded by his son, Nicholas, whose czarina, Alexandra—whom Maria vehemently dislikes—has her own ideas about Russian supremacy, fueled in part by her alliance with the unsavory Rasputin. Politics and war form the backdrop of a story more closely focused on court gossip, family tensions, and the arrogance and isolation that led the Romanovs to their doom. “We existed in a dream,” Maria reflects, “enclosed in our lacquered splendor.”
A briskly narrated tale of power and revolution.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-425-28616-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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