Packed with history, intrigue, and social controversy, along with well-crafted action scenes.
Quaver’s fifth volume in his The Ordeals of Elly Robin series brings his irrepressible protagonist to Chicago just before America’s entry into World War I.
It’s 1915, and teen prodigy Elly Robin, 15, has driven her Stanley Steamer motorcar from New Orleans to Chicago to study with piano virtuoso Maestro Vitorio Bellini. During a concert engagement in New Orleans, Bellini discovered Elly while she was the piano player in a bordello he was visiting. Impressed by the young girl’s exceptional skill on the keyboard, and seriously inebriated, he offered to be her mentor should she ever come to Chicago. Bellini’s sister, with whom he lives, arranges for Lillian LaSalle, wife of wealthy clothing manufacturer Franklin LaSalle, to be Elly’s patron. Lillian is to be responsible for instructing the socially awkward Elly in the social graces, necessary if she is to become a world-famous pianist, while Bellini schools her in the musical subtleties of the great classical composers. Elly—orphaned at 6 during the San Francisco earthquake and left to her own devices after fleeing an abusive children’s asylum—enters the LaSalle mansion and finds herself surrounded by unimagined luxury. The LaSalle children, especially Wilhelmina (“Willy”), treat her with hostility. But, as Elly learns, beneath the glittering exterior, the LaSalle family harbors dark secrets, mysteries that our young hero, who always keeps a sheathed stiletto hidden in her bodice, plans to unearth. Elly has her own secrets, a past she must keep hidden if she is to succeed within society. When Lillian hires tutor Carrie Gunther to teach Elly the foreign languages she’ll need for world tours, she unwittingly brings a rebel into the LaSalle household, someone who will expose Elly to the burgeoning labor movement plus a group of Anarchists, an association that puts Elly’s position, and possibly even her life, in danger.
Although followers of the series will know Elly’s backstory, those new to the saga must wait patiently for the details to be revealed gradually, especially when significant characters from her past reappear in the current volume. Quaver, a retired professional pianist, adeptly portrays the power of music to transport both artist and audience. Readers unfamiliar with the classical music references will still feel the intensity of Elly’s performances, although Quaver compromises the impact with too much repetition. As the author cautions in his opening notes, dialogue reflects the linguistics of the period, including offensive racial and ethnic slurs. These choices contribute to a realistic rendering of Chicago’s economic, social, and ethnic diversity and tensions in the early 20th century. The novel seamlessly blends historical figures and fictional characters. For example, Elly’s interactions with an aging and alcoholic Jack London and a fiery Emma Goldman add spice to the narrative. Her romantic liaison with Edwin Friend, aviation enthusiast and one of society’s most eligible bachelors, supplies poignancy and a bit of humor in a tale that culminates with a breathless, page-turning chase through the streets of Chicago, leading Elly straight into the next installment of this continuing saga. Quaver’s black-and-white drawings accompany the text.
Packed with history, intrigue, and social controversy, along with well-crafted action scenes.Pub Date: June 24, 2021
ISBN: 9798526346214
Page Count: 486
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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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