A muscular, richly atmospheric novel of art and artists.
Joaquim presents a biographical novel about the brilliant French painter Claude Monet and his second wife, Alice.
This sweeping, generous narrative takes its title from the Monet’s famous contribution to a groundbreaking 1874 group show in Paris in which he and a group of well-known colleagues, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Edgar Degas, introduced the world to impressionism. The author uses the long arc of Monet’s career, his many sales and exhibitions, as the backdrop to his personal life. Readers first meet Monet while he’s still with his first wife, Camille, and they meet Alice when she’s married to businessman and art collector Ernest Hoschede. Joaquim fills chapters with details of the Hoschede family’s life, and the slow progression of Monet as he moves from penury and obscurity to fame, while also including controlled digressions about his contemporaries: “Their respect and affection for one another went unspoken, but it was all there, manifested in a friendly glance, a knowing smile, a reluctant nod, a familiar chuckle.” The narrative becomes more tense and emotional when, in the wake of Camille’s death, Alice leaves her spouse to live with Monet and begins brashly and affectionately speaking of him in public, “the way a woman talks about the man she cares about most in the world, the man who is her lover and confidant.” Sometimes the author’s prose can feel overcooked (“Overwhelmed and completely caught off guard, in an explosive flash of time, like a paper doll crushed and twisted by a reckless hand, she crumbled to the floor”). However, much of the work will very favorably remind readers of such excellent novels as Irving Stone’s Vincent Van Gogh-centered Lust for Life (1934), or Rembrandt (1961) by Gladys Schmitt.
A muscular, richly atmospheric novel of art and artists.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781737755937
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 surprisingly sensual sports romance.
A collegiate diver and swimmer secretly pursue kink together, and risk falling in love along the way.
Scarlett Vandermeer is struggling. Despite a successful recovery from the injury that almost ended her Stanford diving career, she hasn’t been able to get her head together, and it’s affecting her performance. Plus, she’s trying to stay focused on getting into medical school. A relationship would be out of the question. By comparison, Lukas Blomqvist is a swimming idol, a record-breaker who wins medals as easily as breathing, and Scarlett has long been convinced he would never look in her direction—until one fateful night when a mutual friend lets slip that they have something unexpected in common: Scarlett likes to be submissive in the bedroom, while Lukas prefers to take a dominant approach. Now, they both know a big secret about each other, and it’s something neither of them can stop thinking about. It’s Lukas who suggests they have a fling—purely physical, just to take the edge off, so Scarlett can get out of her own head and stop overthinking her dives. Initially, their arrangement is easy to stick to, but the more time they spend together, the more Scarlett starts to realize that what she feels for Lukas is more than physical attraction. Complicating the situation is the fact that Scarlett’s friend Penelope Ross used to go out with Lukas, and the longer Scarlett keeps mum about her true feelings for him, the more difficult it is to keep the situation hidden from another person she really cares about. While Scarlett and Lukas’ relationship does begin as a physical one, their deeper psychological connection takes a little too long to emerge amid all the other storylines, resulting in a somewhat rushed resolution. However, Hazelwood’s latest is proof of the depth and maturity that has emerged in her writing over the years, and it highlights her embrace of sexier, more emotional elements than were present in her original STEMinist rom-coms.
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593641057
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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