Despite some awkward POV shifts, the action proceeds briskly, with just enough technical and period detail to sustain...
First novel melds the stories of a 17th-century master craftsman and his modern-day descendant.
Born in Venice, the product of her mother’s short-lived marriage to vaporetto boatman Bruno Manin, Leonora was raised in England. Now in her mid-30s, Leonora has returned to Venice, fleeing her broken marriage, destroyed by too many futile courses of IVF and by her husband’s infidelity. Leonora uses her divorce settlement to launch two long-deferred quests: to learn more about her late-Renaissance forbear, renowned glassblower Corradino Manin, and to become a Venetian glass maestra herself. First stop: the Isle of Murano, still Venice’s main hub of artisanal glass. In Corradino’s day, craftsmen were sequestered on Murano to prevent them from communicating the secrets on which Venice’s glass monopoly depended. Leonora lands an apprenticeship in the fornace (glass atelier) of Adelino. But Roberto, descended from another fabled Murano glass man, Giacomo del Piero, uses her male colleagues’ gender bias against her. Sexy policeman Alessandro insinuates himself into Leonora’s bed, then goes intermittently AWOL. Desperate to increase sales, Adelino hires a PR crew to capitalize on the Manin cachet, using photogenic Leonora (repeatedly described as a Botticelli-blonde beauty) as a spokeswoman. The campaign backfires when Alessandro’s ex-girlfriend, a tabloid reporter, interviews Roberto, who claims that Corradino sold Venice’s glass formula to France, betraying his teacher and protector, Giacomo del Piero. Now happily pregnant but unemployed, Leonora must rehabilitate the Manin name by proving Corradino wasn’t a traitor. Corradino’s story alternates with Leonora’s. Sole survivor of a noble family massacred by the Doge’s enforcers, The Ten, Corradino, oppressed by constant surveillance, steals away to France to create Louis XIV’s hall of mirrors at Versailles. But can he save his mentor, del Piero, and his secret daughter, Leonora, if The Ten tracks him down?
Despite some awkward POV shifts, the action proceeds briskly, with just enough technical and period detail to sustain interest.Pub Date: June 2, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-38698-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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