Although it's entering a crowded field of biographies, fictional or not, of various Founding Fathers, Cobbs' meticulous...
Cobbs' novel chronicles the difficult political and family life of Alexander Hamilton.
Well before the publication date of this novel, the Broadway musical based on Hamilton’s life will in all likelihood have won many Tony awards. Can another fictional re-examination of this controversial statesman succeed in saying anything new about Hamilton—and do it without rap songs? Hamilton’s story certainly invites dramatization. Born the illegitimate son of a runaway wife on the Caribbean island of Nevis and raised in St. Croix, Hamilton is disinherited in early adolescence when his mother dies of a malarial fever. His intelligence and grit net him a clerk position with an importer and then sponsorship to leave the islands for New York to further his education. Swept up in revolutionary fervor, he becomes George Washington’s aide-de-camp, eventually winning his own command but always bucking the disadvantages of his humble beginnings. He meets his future wife, Eliza, whose father, Philip Schuyler, is a New York landholder who throws in his lot with the Continentals. Chapters narrated by Eliza alternate with chapters narrated by Alexander, and the first half of the novel lacks momentum as the characters negotiate the ponderous logistics of courtship, marriage, intrigue, jockeying for position on the battlefield and in Washington’s Cabinet, etc. It isn’t until the end of the Revolutionary War that the plot thickens. Alexander, appointed the United States' first Treasury Secretary, puts out countless fiscal fires threatening the fledgling republic’s economy. He not only refuses to own slaves, but publicly advocates for abolition. He is subjected to much unfair opprobrium, largely, it appears, because he doesn't belong to the post-revolutionary boys’ club. James Monroe, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson come off as particularly ignoble, and Aaron Burr seems downright sociopathic. Cobbs displays how Hamilton’s outsider status leaves him very little wiggle room: an extramarital affair which might have been hushed up in the right circles leads directly to his downfall.
Although it's entering a crowded field of biographies, fictional or not, of various Founding Fathers, Cobbs' meticulous account holds its own—even without catchy tunes.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62872-720-3
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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