A wonderfully strange and quirky tale about the power of penning and performing tales.
A comic novel (tinged with gothic elements) about a girl trapped in her family’s theater in Norwich, England in 1901.
When Edith Holler—the precocious 12-year-old narrator of this twisty tale—was christened, an old actress put a curse on her: If the girl ever stepped outside, she would die and the “entire theatre would come tumbling down.” Afterward, the story goes, the actress exploded, spattering blood everywhere. But is the story real? “We who live in the theatre here have some belief in magical things,” Edith tells us. Both imprisoned and perfectly content, Edith roams the nooks and crannies of the theater, and when she tires of this, she reads about the town’s history and makes a disturbing discovery: The children of Norwich have been disappearing in astonishing numbers. Moreover, she has a pretty good hunch who’s responsible: folk legend Mawther Meg, the woman who allegedly invented Utting’s Beetle Spread, a local delicacy. Since no one takes her seriously, Edith pursues the only avenue open to a child forbidden by her father from speaking to outsiders: She writes a play. This, in turn, sets into motion an uncanny sequence of events that seems to come straight from her script and gives credence to her father’s warning that once a play is out in the world, its characters come to life. Though Carey’s book runs a wee bit long, it is a raucous romp through the world of early 20th-century theater, with its barrels of fake blood and donkeys living in the bowels of the understage to provide the muscle for scene changes. In ways both witty and dark, the novel brilliantly probes the distinction between drama and real life, audience and performer, actor and character. And the whimsical illustrations, all drawn by Carey himself, are the perfect accompaniment to a story about an art form as visual as it is verbal.
A wonderfully strange and quirky tale about the power of penning and performing tales.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780593188903
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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