Agreeable historical fiction that both informs and entertains.
Last in an ambitious trilogy about a queen and a former slave fast-forwards to the present: here, a newly discovered cache of documents suggests that a black Barbadian woman may be the true queen of England.
Deftly mixing scholarship and history, Stevenson (The Winter Queen, 2002; The Shadow King, 2003) creates a tale rich in ironies and send-ups of academic intransigence as she continues the story of Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, sister of Charles I of England. In exile in Holland, in 1639, Elizabeth married Pelagius, a freed but once-enslaved African prince, and the next year, she gave birth to a son, Balthasar. Now, in present-day Holland, historian Corinne is having trouble not only with her department head but also with finishing her dissertation, not to mention worries that she may not get a teaching job. In England, Michael is teaching English at Oxford but is bored as well, and tired of college politics. He and Corinne once dated, so when she’s alerted to the discovery of 17th-century documents that include a copy of a play by Aphra Behn, the first British woman playwright, she contacts Michael. Interested, Michael visits her in Holland, carries off the relevant documents, and is soon as absorbed as Corinne in the story of Elizabeth and Pelagius. He learns that the couple’s son lived in London, visited Barbados, and wrote a botanical treatise, and that their grandson, Theodore Stuart, married Godscall Palaeologue, the daughter of the last heir to the Byzantine throne. The Palaeologues settled in Barbados, and Michael now discovers that a Dr. Palaeologue is teaching at the university there. While Corinne fights on in academia, Michael heads for Barbados. There, the doctor turns out to be a comely young black woman called Melita, who warms more to Michael than to the notion that she is the true heir—a Stuart, not a Windsor—to the British throne in fulfillment of an ancient prophecy.
Agreeable historical fiction that both informs and entertains.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-14914-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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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