An absorbing and touching tale about young women at the French royal court.
A historical novel set in 17th-century France focuses on the court of the Sun King.
Porter’s fictional elaboration on the celebrated ballet Giselle, with a libretto by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Théophile Gautier, opens at the Ursuline convent school in Niort during the reign of King Louis XIV. There, readers meet little Princess Bathilde, her friend Myrte Vernier, and new arrival to the school Françoise d’Aubigne, who is dropped off one day by her haughty guardian, the Baronne de Neuillant. Françoise is welcomed by the school’s mother superior, who takes in girls left at Ursuline for all kinds of reasons (“Families thrust their girls into the convent to be rid of them, either because they’re too ill-featured to catch a husband, or have a small dowry, or after they’ve been orphaned”). The narrative follows Bathilde and Françoise as they grow older and find their places at the court of the king and his bride (and the scheming Cardinal Mazarin). Françoise goes from serving as the governess to the king’s illegitimate children (and affianced to the loathsome Paul Scarron, a writer constantly inviting scandal) to being the unofficial consort to the monarch himself. Bathilde engages in a romance with Albin Maurice Laurent Bertrand, the Marquis de Brénoville and Duc de Rozel. Audiences familiar with the general outline of Giselle will find Porter’s narrative naturally engaging, but she’s taken care to keep other readers involved as well. That said, she has a penchant for melodramatic writing, as in this passage about Bathilde: “This assurance sent a warm flow of pleasure and relief coursing from her head to her toes.” In addition, the author’s characters talk and think like holdovers from Sir Walter Scott’s novels, which 21st-century readers may find hard to accept. At one point, Wilfride Mensy, Albin’s manservant, squire, and cousin, muses about Bathilde, whom he adores: “His feelings for Princess Bathilde, he felt certain, would endure for his entire life, to his last day. And beyond, if human emotions survived in the afterlife.” Fortunately, Porter’s research and storytelling energy generally compensate for this, drawing readers into a fully realized, moving portrait of the storied court of Louis XIV.
An absorbing and touching tale about young women at the French royal court.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8-9856734-9-4
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Gallica Press
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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