Sharratt’s gift for grounding larger issues in everyday lives makes for historical fiction at its best.
With this novel about Margery Kempe, mother of 14–turned–pilgrim and preacher, Sharratt’s obsession with medieval women mystics continues.
Margery, like most middle-class young women in 14th-century England, is not allowed to choose her own husband, and her true love is lost at sea. At first, she’s resigned to her parents’ choice for her, John Kempe, a brewer in the provincial town of Bishop’s Lynn, but after the birth of their first child, she suffers what now might be diagnosed as postpartum psychosis: She is hounded by hellish visions of demons, but one day, an unforgettable vision of Christ restores her to sanity. Her contentment with domesticity sours over years of nonstop childbearing—the effects of 14 pregnancies are recounted in chilling detail. In desperation, Margery insists that John join her in a mutual vow of chastity, and he acquiesces, letting Margery embark on longed-for pilgrimages, first to Jerusalem and later to Spain, to follow the path of Santiago de Compostela. Before leaving England, she meets Julian of Norwich, a mystic and “anchoress” voluntarily confined in a cell attached to a church. (Readers will recall Hildegard von Bingen’s ordeal as an anchoress’s companion in Sharratt's 2012 Illuminations.) Julian validates, by example, Margery’s belief in a personal relationship with God, free of clerical mediation. Julian also entrusts her own manuscript—doubly transgressive because it's in English and a woman wrote it—to Margery. In the Holy Land, Margery’s religious ecstasies, marked by loud weeping, are offensive, as Sharratt wryly notes, only to English Catholics; Eastern Christians are fine with it. Drawn from Kempe’s actual autobiography, the novel is enhanced by Sharratt’s storytelling ability. The pilgrimage sections are rescued from tedium by Margery’s heedlessness of social opprobrium and her resulting clashes with fellow pilgrims. Readers will root for Margery as she wins friends among a minority of kindred spirits, who, like her, dare to imagine such heresies as Scriptures in English and women writing books.
Sharratt’s gift for grounding larger issues in everyday lives makes for historical fiction at its best.Pub Date: April 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-328-51877-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
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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