Brilliantly researched, imaginative cross-genre historical fiction.
A part fantastical ghost story, part romance focuses on Modigliani’s lover.
Paris, 1920: Italian painter Modigliani dies of consumption. Two days later, Jeanne Hébuterne, artist, model, and common-law wife of Modi, throws herself out the window of her parents’ home. Jeanne dies, but her spirit survives. Tethered to her body by an ethereal umbilical cord, she is prepared for burial in the artist studio she shared with Modi. As a ghost, no one hears her while she rails that the studio has been ransacked and Modi’s paintings have vanished. Her brother, André, collects her work but doesn’t find the piece she had not yet finished, the painting she was going to give Modi had he recovered. Modi had started a picture of her and their baby daughter but abandoned it. Jeanne took up the painting and added Modi’s figure but did not complete it before they both died. After her burial, Jeanne is no longer tied to her body and must navigate the afterlife, searching for Modi. Lappin’s striking afterlife creates a compelling secondary realm to the superbly researched, fleshed-out historical world in and around Paris. What could easily have been a biographical novel—one that ended with Jeanne’s death—is instead a far more intricate tale. The time periods include Paris, 1920; Vichy France under Nazi rule, 1941; and then another layer: 1981, when an art historian uncovers Jeanne’s work and journals. In this blend of world events, art history, and ghost story, one of the author’s greatest strengths is her worldbuilding. Death, from the very first page, is fully realized. The umbilical cord that initially connects Jeanne to her corpse is as “clear and stretchy as a jellyfish tentacle, and a bit sticky, like old egg whites. It shimmered like mother of pearl.” There are rules and a detailed bureaucracy in the world of the dead. One must have money to catch a train; the train has compartments based on class; and Jeanne must inquire about Modi’s whereabouts with the bureau, which is divided according to one’s religion. The book’s inventive afterlife is as vividly drawn as the streets of Paris.
Brilliantly researched, imaginative cross-genre historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947175-30-3
Page Count: 263
Publisher: Serving House Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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