Best read in spurts, since the overabundance of entries diffuses the addictively catty fun.
A satirical recounting of the romance between Wallis Simpson and the Prince of Wales, as narrated by a fictional witness to the affair.
Because Maybell Brumby is not quite a sympathetic cross between Lady Bricknell and Auntie Mame—in fact, her one redeeming trait is her genuine affection for her niece and nephew—she is the perfect foil for the conniving Mrs. Simpson. A silly and frivolous widow of means who consistently misinterprets the words and actions of those around her, Maybell arrives in London in 1932 to visit her sisters, attracted in part by news that her childhood playmate “Wally” has shown up with a new husband. Maybell lends money, jewelry and furs as the money-strapped but ambitious Wally Simpson makes her way into society despite a dubious past. Maybell’s diary of the next decade follows Wally’s manipulations as she rises from nobody to hanger-on to prince’s mistress to Duchess of Windsor. The purposely inane diary goes on too long with who wore what where, but it is studded with moments of genuinely funny idiocy: Maybell calls Harrods “Harrold’s” throughout; mistakes Cole Porter for a coal porter; gets comically seasick on the Guinness yacht. More seriously, she does not realize that her younger sister is deaf, not retarded. And Hitler seems quite the fellow to Maybell until actual war breaks out. No judge of character, Maybell abets Wally as she pursues the prince, who everybody but Maybell recognizes is a simpleton unsuited to the throne. While Maybell is foolish but endearing, Wally is conniving, vicious, money-grubbing and power-hungry—also a slut and gambler. According to Graham (Future Homemakers of America, 2002), Wally is out-maneuvered by the Royals when her lover is forced off the throne and out of a large portion of his inheritance. In the end, Wally uses up even Maybell’s patience.
Best read in spurts, since the overabundance of entries diffuses the addictively catty fun.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-087271-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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