Covering little more than a third of Sofi’s life, this love-obsessed narrative leaves plenty of room for a sequel, but no...
YA author Cullen’s foray into adult fiction features a groundbreaking female Renaissance painter but doesn’t give her much to do.
Sofonisba Anguissola’s father, an impoverished Genoan count, bucked convention to secure her the finest artistic training. Now Sofi, who signs her work Virgo, is studying in Rome with Michelangelo. She takes advantage of her chaperone Francesca’s ill-advised absence one day in 1559 to consummate her infatuation with Tiberio, another of the maestro’s apprentices. Their tryst is interrupted (too late for Sofi’s virginity) by Michelangelo himself, and shortly thereafter Francesca whisks her disgraced charge back home to Cremona. Languishing in hopes of a proposal from Tiberio, Sofi receives instead a summons from the court of Felipe II of Spain. The king engages her as a drawing instructor and lady-in-waiting to his new bride, Elisabeth de Valois, 14-year-old daughter of Henri II of France. Sofi’s artistic aspirations and thwarted longing for Tiberio are quickly overshadowed by Elisabeth’s travails. Felipe eschews marital relations until she attains puberty, then waits patiently for her to conceive a child. Her mother, dragon-lady Catherine de Medici, tries to micromanage the marriage from afar. Soon, Sofi is Elisabeth’s most trusted confidante, supplanting less loyal courtiers like Felipe’s disgruntled sister Doña Juana and his mistress Eufrasia. The young queen is surrounded by a cadre of attractive young men, including the king’s handsome young half brother, Don Juan (no relation to the legendary rake). He captures Elisabeth’s heart, and their love threatens to doom both the queen and her allies. The author neglects Sofi’s artistic and personal development in favor of a more conventional emphasis on romance—mostly a spectator sport for the painter at the Spanish court.
Covering little more than a third of Sofi’s life, this love-obsessed narrative leaves plenty of room for a sequel, but no one’s likely to be terribly interested unless it offers a more three-dimensional portrait of the artist.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 0425238709
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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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