An unassuming but riveting tale of the hardships and ultimate rewards of family.
In this debut novel, an orphan living in an Irish convent becomes torn between resentment and compassion when she learns the identity of the mother who seemingly abandoned her.
After 6-year-old Mary Margaret Joyce endures a callous foster family, a judge sends her to Saint Thomas’ Industrial School in 1943. Upon meeting the girl, Sister Constance changes her name to Peg, as there are “too many Marys.” Convent life isn’t always easy, with strict rules and sometimes-harsh nuns, but Peg perseveres and even makes a few friends. She gets a reprieve from the convent when the sisters send her on a one-week holiday to stay with Norah Hanley and her husband, Dan. Peg thoroughly enjoys time with the couple and is sad to leave. Fortunately, her visits become an annual event, but when Norah and Dan begin having children, Peg longs to be part of a family—perhaps theirs. Knowing that she was a child born out of wedlock, Peg soon suspects that her birth mother is Norah or her sister, Hannah. Peg is angry that her mother would give her away, but it’s also clear that an unmarried pregnant woman in Ireland bears the sole responsibility (and punishment) for what some perceive as a sin. Daniele’s story is quietly engaging; her straightforward prose details Peg’s arduous time at the convent without recounting graphic abuse. For example, when a nun punishes Peg and another girl with slaps to their faces, it’s a startling moment primarily because the sister strikes without warning. The author furthermore succeeds at generating sympathy for both Peg and her mother. The girl’s fury is understandable, but her mother, readers learn, has her own tale to tell. Captivating supporting characters help shape Peg’s often dour world, from kindhearted nuns to a girl at the convent who suffers periodic seizures. Daniele leaves the ending open, with the possibility of more stories about the appealing young protagonist.
An unassuming but riveting tale of the hardships and ultimate rewards of family.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-943006-94-6
Page Count: 242
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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