A captivating work of historical fiction, intellectually stimulating and dramatically engrossing.
Mastro’s historical novel dramatizes the romantic life of Mary Wollstonecraft, the great 18th-century feminist, and her defense of the French Revolution.
In 1787, Mary Wollstonecraft is fired from her position as governess of three young women on the charge of being overly progressive; the incident is a microcosm of her uphill struggle to affect “an end to women’s blind obedience.” She returns to London to pursue her ambition to become a writer, and with the encouragement of publisher Joseph Johnson, she establishes a reputation as a radical reformer, especially with her Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. However, despite her own efforts to control her passions, she becomes infatuated with the married artist Henry Fuseli. He indiscreetly boasts of her attachment to him, an embarrassment that threatens to ruin her good reputation. Obsessed with the ongoing revolution in France, she exiles herself to Paris, a tinderbox of political violence, and risks being imprisoned, as all foreigners are seen as potential spies. In this gripping “work of fiction told in chronological order” focusing on Wollstonecraft’s “late-blooming love affairs,” the legendary feminist is torn between the need to flee an increasingly unsafe Paris and her attachment to Captain Gilbert Imlay, an American adventurer and fellow writer. This account of Wollstonecraft’s life deftly manages to be both literarily inventive and faithful to the facts of her life. A fiercely independent woman dedicated to the liberty of women everywhere, Wollstonecraft in these pages struggles to reconcile her ideal of “rational love” with the consuming carnal desires she experiences. Mastro also thoughtfully depicts her intellectual crisis regarding the French Revolution; initially, she was enthusiastically in favor of it and pilloried Edmund Burke’s famous critique. But later, as the Revolution devolved into violence and tyranny, she came to wonder if he was actually right. The author’s prose authentically captures the dialogue of the time and powerfully evokes the contradictions that make Wollstonecraft’s legacy so richly complex.
A captivating work of historical fiction, intellectually stimulating and dramatically engrossing.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781685135614
Page Count: 319
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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