An intriguing, historically grounded imagining of behind-the scenes machinations during a crucial moment in European history.
Myers’ (Greek Bonds and French Ladies, 2013) historical novel explores Parisian politics on the eve of the Second World War.
Paris in 1937 and 1938 is a precarious place and time in history. The Popular Front, led by the socialist Léon Blum, is constantly under attack by reactionaries and can’t secure a stable hold on the government. Fascists and leftists wage a civil war against each other in France’s southern neighbor, Spain, while the eastern neighbor, Germany, is becoming increasingly aggressive. All of Paris feels as if it’s facing an ideological threat to its existence, but Parisians are divided—primarily along class lines—over whether the threat comes from German Nazism or Russian Bolshevism. Myers articulates these tensions through a rich cast of characters, including the real-life anti-Nazi journalist Geneviève Tabouis; industrial heiress and high-society seductress Countess Marie Hélène de Villars-Brancas; ambitious young politician Jules Dugas; and conniving German diplomat Carl Friedrich von Dinckler. Much of the novel’s plot deals specifically with the lead-up to the Munich Agreement (or the “Munich Betrayal,” as many Central Europeans called it), in which France and Britain chose to appease, rather than challenge, the military advances of Nazi Germany. In Myers’ portrayal of the era, sexual affairs and espionage come into play as the Germans and their allies try to shore up French support for appeasement. It can occasionally be difficult to follow the characters’ comings and goings as they dash around Europe: there are many brief scenes that might have benefited from a bit of expansion, particularly in establishing settings. However, the characters embody the complexity and conflicts of the historical moment. Myers has done his research and impeccably draws the month-to-month social and political situations. The setting also creates a tragic dramatic irony; some of Myers’ characters may believe the Munich Agreement will prevent war and destruction, but readers already know this won’t be the case.
An intriguing, historically grounded imagining of behind-the scenes machinations during a crucial moment in European history.Pub Date: June 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5143-6460-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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