A thoroughly fresh historical novel that both captures the essence of its time and echoes challenges that still exist today.
Handler's fierce, sensually vivid debut novel takes off from the life of a little-known but fascinating figure from 19th-century American history.
Lulu Hurst was a gawky 14-year-old from a small town in Georgia when she entered the public eye. Beginning in 1883, she toured on the vaudeville circuit for two years, demonstrating magical powers allegedly acquired from magnetic forces that entered her body during an electrical storm. Giggling sweetly, she would cause men much larger than herself to be catapulted across a room or levitated from the chairs in which they were firmly seated. Working from a self-debunking autobiography Lulu published decades later, memoirist Handler (Braving the Fire, 2013, etc.) veers from history to create a satisfying work of fiction featuring a damaged younger brother, an ambitious father with a taste for gambling, and a dead grandmother with a surprising connection to the young magician. Lulu, who narrates most of the novel, is a compelling character, simultaneously intense and insecure. She knows that the act she and her skeptical father work out is designed to take advantage of the “marks” in the audience, but she also feels she has a real ability to “captivate” and “mesmerize” those she chooses to control, and she hopes she will gain the ability to heal her brother. Supersensitive, she pricks her skin with a needle to bring her giddy emotions under control, hears the thoughts of others, and feels a hangnail “shrill like a bugle from a fat man driving a cart.” As vivid as Lulu is the theatrical environment where she engages in “the subtle work of humbugging the city's finest” and is dazzled daily by an aerialist with trained cats or a juggler wearing “revealing tights.” Using this unique situation, Handler captures the ambivalence of female adolescence, where the newfound ability to captivate others exists in unsteady balance with the fear of loss of independence.
A thoroughly fresh historical novel that both captures the essence of its time and echoes challenges that still exist today.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-938235-48-1
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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