A bumbling lummox turned business superstar in 15th-century Europe is the hero of the first volume of a promised historical series, by the author of several mysteries and the Francis of Lymond novels. Claes is an oversized apprentice in the dye-shops of the Charetty company; he's widely known to be humble, clumsy and hilarious, with a streak of inventive genius. His numerous pranks have incurred the wrath of the town leaders of the merchant city of Bruges, culminating in a near-fatal fight with the handsome and loathsome Simon of Kilmirren. Marian de Charetty, the widowed owner of the company Claes serves, offers her beleaguered apprentice the option of joining a band of mercenaries on their way to Milan. Claes counterproposes that the small army act as a courier service, carrying documents over the Alps. On arriving in Milan, Claes calls on the local branch of the Medici and on other powerful personages, tantilizing them with carefully gleaned information and trade secrets he's pieced together from letters he's carried and codes he's deciphered. He also drops a provocative hint: that the monopoly on alum (the scarce white powder used to bind dye to cloth) that this group enjoys is threatened by the so-far secret existence of a new, conveniently located mine. The Medici become a major customer for Claes' courier (and information) service, and they pay him well to keep quiet about the alum. Claes heads back to Bruges, where suddenly he's someone: dealing with all the businessmen who once rolled their eyes at his juvenile tricks, he wheels and deals, makes new contacts, and acts as the brains of the expanding Charetty business—and, always the lady's man, he has a top-secret affair with the spunky Katelina van Borselen, a young noblewoman. Then owner Marian makes a business proposition: she asks Claes to up his respectability by marrying her. For the sake of the firm, he accepts. Now known as Nicholas (or Niccolo), he heads back to Milan for more business triumphs. And brave new plans are in the offering. A knotty confusion of names, places and schemes, but overall an engrossing, often witty portrayal of the early throes of commerce, fleshed out with satisfying characters and complex alliances.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1986
ISBN: 0375704779
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1986
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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