Like the Forsytes saga, worth continuing for four or five more volumes.
The author of the remarkably fine The Laments (2004) returns with another deceptively modest but deeply satisfying story of an intelligent and prickly family and the difficulty of love.
Tom Bedlam was born in the age of Dickens and survived well into the age of Galsworthy, and there are nods to both those greats in this tale of a bright lad in dreadful circumstances. Living with his very odd mother, who adheres to Christian principles despite mean surroundings, Tom faces a bleak future. Mr. Bedlam disappeared shortly after his birth, leaving Emily Bedlam to raise the child in a tenement while she paints china in a dreadful factory in their Vauxhall neighborhood, saving pennies for Tom’s education. Life gets worse when his awful mountebank of a father returns and steals his wife’s savings. Tom has to take on the brutal job of stoking the furnaces that fire the pottery, and he fancies himself happy enough. There is, after all, the opportunity to explore the topography of his lavishly built coworker Sissy, even as he ignores the love of Audrey, one of the daughters of the large rackety Limpkin family across the landing. Then Emily’s sanity and health fail, bringing both her estranged husband and estranged father, a wealthy brewer, to her deathbed. The brewer sends Tom off to school, where he acquires manners and a start on the path to a career in medicine. At the school he is the only witness to the murder of a much-bullied friend. The murderer, in the best Dickensian tradition, will turn up later, wealthy and important. Tom, with support from the father of the murderer, becomes a doctor and a gentleman. Desperate to be the father he never had, he elopes with one of two equally loving sisters to South Africa and becomes a family man whose three daughters and one fey son draw him back to England and the terrors of the Great War.
Like the Forsytes saga, worth continuing for four or five more volumes.Pub Date: June 12, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6222-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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