THE ICEWEAVER

Name: THE ICEWEAVER
Author: Margaret Lawrence
ISBN: 0-380-97621-8

by Margaret Lawrence ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2000

Enough sumptuous prose poetry to sate the most demanding palate, though some readers will feel restless long before the...

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An ambitious fantasy on situations and themes from The English Patient, transplanted to 1809 New York, yields mixed results.

As the Napoleonic Wars cast their shadow over the young country in the form of an inconvenient trade embargo with nearby Canada and renewed Indian unrest provoked by white men’s quarrels, John Frayne returns to the town of New Forge to reclaim the property his father forfeited when he would not take a loyalty oath. Purchasing the right to feed and clothe a pair of indigents, an elderly family friend and a young mute woman first glimpsed pushing the body of her mother into a hole in the frozen lake, Frayne moves into Bay House and sets about making a family. But families are hard for Frayne, who left his first wife, Hester, when she took a lover, and survived a second wife, Tacha, whom he took while living among the Indians. And tensions mount when he finds Hester still involved with the same man, and their son Tim, ten, full of hate for the father who aches to reclaim him. Instead, Frayne devotes himself to Jennet, the mysterious outcast he has taken in, a woman as damaged as he is. As love blooms between them, Lawrence (The Burning Bride, 1998, etc.) cuts away repeatedly to focus on Frayne’s landlord and enemy, scheming shopkeeper Herod Aldrich, who dreams of unlimited wealth and power, and crippled furniture maker Marius Leclerc, who dreams only of shaking off the nightmarish miracle of his surviving Austerlitz. After a glacially slow beginning, Lawrence goes back to the well of memory to dredge up secret after damning secret about the characters. But she’s no Michael Ondaatje, and her melodramatic climax provides more relief than fulfillment.

Enough sumptuous prose poetry to sate the most demanding palate, though some readers will feel restless long before the seventh course arrives.

Pub Date: July 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-380-97621-8

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

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Life lessons.

Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Pub Date: July 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-345-46750-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

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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.