Trenow, who serves as a perfect example of the old adage that you should write what you know—she’s the descendant of...
A routine World War II romance, Trenow’s debut, is distinguished by the author’s smooth-as-silk delivery.
Lily is in the twilight of life as she sorts through the remnants of her past at her rural British home, The Chestnuts. When her granddaughter finds a locked briefcase in a closet, she’s flooded with memories of her youth, including a guilty secret she’s harbored for many years. Lily’s story, told in hindsight, is the tale of a young woman who discovers love and purpose while learning the intricacies of the family business under the tutelage of Gwen, the assistant factory manager. As her friendship with Gwen deepens and the inevitability of war edges closer, Lily excitedly accompanies her brother to a party where she meets pilot Robert Cameron. He visits the family at The Chestnuts and persuades her father and brother to invest in machinery that will enable the mill to manufacture silk for parachutes. A wise venture, their business deal keeps the factory operating and enables the Verner family to sponsor three German refugees and to provide them with jobs and a cottage. Much to her father’s dismay, Lily rebuffs Robert’s romantic advances and falls in love with Stefan, one of the refugees. She’s heartbroken when England enters the war, her brother enlists in the RAF, and Stefan and the two other refugees are taken into custody and shipped to an internment camp in Australia. As the war rages, Lily becomes her father’s assistant and suddenly is thrust into the directorship, which she manages with Gwen’s assistance. She and Stefan have kept their love alive via post, and when he returns to England, now called Stephen Holmes, their romance strengthens. The story takes a predictable path and ends on a too-perfect note, but nevertheless, it’s worth reading.
Trenow, who serves as a perfect example of the old adage that you should write what you know—she’s the descendant of generations of weavers—has penned a mellifluous, impeccably researched narrative.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4022-7945-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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