Weaving together Caroline's and Maria’s journeys, Trenow meticulously stitches each piece of this engrossing story into a...
British author Trenow (The Last Telegram, 2013) methodically intertwines the lives of two women who live a century apart in a complex and poignant novel.
With understated eloquence and compassion, the author breathes life into the story of Maria Romano, a naïve young seamstress who’s spirited away from her job at Buckingham Palace to spend years of her life confined to a mental hospital. An orphan with exceptional needlework skills, Maria is pressed into royal service in 1911, when she's barely a teenager, and falls in love with Prince Edward, the eldest son of King George V and Queen Mary. Maria can’t believe her good fortune when he singles her out for attention—but then she gets pregnant. The young girl is scared but relieved when the housekeeper tells her she’ll be taken care of, and she’s instructed to gather her bag and get into a carriage. Maria packs up all her worldly possessions, including the beginnings of a patchwork quilt she’s pieced together from scraps of fabric she lifted from a palace cupboard, and assumes she’s being taken somewhere safe to await the birth of her infant. Rather than a regular hospital, however, she’s confined to a mental institution where she hazily recalls giving birth but is told her child died. As the reality of her situation sinks in, Maria attempts to run away, fails and retreats into her own soundless world until a volunteer's encouragement rekindles her interest in stitchery. After 50 years of institutionalization, Maria's childhood friend finds her and arranges for Maria to live in her home—and in 1970, Maria's story is preserved by a student interviewing ex-patients of the mental facility for a research project. Years later, Caroline Meadows struggles with a recent breakup, termination from her banking job and her mother’s descent into dementia as she cleans out the family home. Inside a suitcase, she finds a beautiful patchwork quilt once promised to her by her grandmother, and she’s compelled to explore the quilt’s origins. As Caroline uncovers its secrets, she discovers the threads that bind her to Maria, begins to understand the meaning of home and summons the courage to consider new directions in her life.
Weaving together Caroline's and Maria’s journeys, Trenow meticulously stitches each piece of this engrossing story into a unified—and heartwarming—whole.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8248-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
