Amid a welter of window-dressing and a surfeit of repartee, the story gets lost in an overzealous and ultimately vain effort...
Faux 18th-century novel tandem-written by American history professors Lepore (Harvard Univ.; New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan, 2005, etc.) and Kamensky (Brandeis Univ.; The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse, 2008).
On the run from creditors in Edinburgh, Scottish portrait painter Stewart “Jamie” Jameson sets up shop in colonial Boston. His advertisement for an apprentice is answered by Fanny Easton, disguised as “Francis Weston.” The daughter of a prominent judge, Fanny/Francis fell from grace when her painting master got her pregnant. After the child was born dead (she thinks), her father disowned her, condemning her to the workhouse. But she’d learned something about art as well as dalliance from her teacher, and Jamie is struck by Weston’s talent. The duo earns renown as “face-painters,” numbering among their eager clients Samuel Bradstreet, an abolitionist and advocate for the cause of Liberty. When Bradstreet dies suddenly, the coroner determines that the cause was arsenic poisoning; Bradstreet’s slave Hannah, her daughter Phebe and husband Cicero are immediately suspected. Meanwhile, Jamie’s African friend Ignatius Alexander, an Oxford don turned fugitive slave, has surfaced and is hiding in the painter’s lodgings. After Cicero confesses to Bradstreet’s murder to save his wife and child, Alexander launches an inquiry to exculpate the slaves. The key is Bradstreet’s will, now missing, which frees Hannah and her child. Jamie, who bankrupted himself in Scotland to help Alexander, indebts himself further in the New World with a plan to send Weston to England to study with Joshua Reynolds. But his paternal attitude toward the boy is complicated by lust—which is puzzling, since like the rakes he’s supposed to resemble, Jamie’s heterosexuality is never in doubt. In an extended “explainer” scene, Alexander solves Bradstreet’s murder. The book veers vertiginously from Enlightenment-era satire to Lifetime-era family dysfunction in its humorless portrayal of Fanny’s villainous father.
Amid a welter of window-dressing and a surfeit of repartee, the story gets lost in an overzealous and ultimately vain effort to out-whack the wackiness of Shamela or Tristram Shandy.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52619-7
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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