An engaging tale based on the life of an intriguing woman.
A historical novel focuses on the life of a groundbreaking scientist.
In this book, part of the Mentoris Project’s series celebrating noteworthy figures in Italian and Italian American history, Selbo explores the life of 18th-century polymath Laura Bassi. Bassi overcame barriers and prejudice to become the first woman to teach at the University of Bologna. The story opens with 5-year-old Laura asking challenging questions and showing her thirst for knowledge. She begins studying at home with tutors and demonstrates an aptitude for learning and an affinity for the new forms of scientific research that are being developed at the time. Although her mother worries that her daughter’s lack of interest in socializing will doom her to spinsterhood, Laura ends up marrying a fellow academic who supports her research and the laboratory that she establishes at home when the university does not allow her to work on its campus. The author blends lush historical details (“She walked down the center aisle, elegant in a deep blue beaded silk gown, her hairpieces studded with crystals and pearls”) with Laura’s more intellectual pursuits, maintaining a balance between creating the setting and examining more esoteric topics. The book skillfully invokes the Enlightenment themes that drive Laura’s work—science and religion, experiments versus theories, the pursuit of learning—developing them in the text as well as inserting them in characters’ conversations. Readers with limited historical backgrounds will have little trouble following the plot, as Selbo puts Laura’s letters to other prominent scientists, Roman Catholic Church politics, and the characters’ daily lives in the necessary context. The author also adds details and cameo appearances by historical figures who will be familiar to those with knowledge of the era. The novel hews closely to Bassi’s documented history and does an excellent job of plausibly and satisfyingly filling in the blanks of her story. The book is informative without being didactic and delivers an enjoyable narrative that also achieves its educational goals.
An engaging tale based on the life of an intriguing woman.Pub Date: April 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947431-29-4
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Barbera Foundation
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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