Overly ornate though engrossing depiction of a tumultuous period in Italian history, when the French looted Italian...
The back story of Puccini’s opera Tosca.
Early on we meet Floria Tosca, a 15-year-old peasant girl from the Venetian countryside. She's gifted with a beautiful voice, which is noticed in 1789 by a bishop who hears her singing in her local parish choir. He invites her to Venice—promising her parents she will be safely housed in a convent when she’s not soloing in the cathedral. But soon a nobleman, Prince Belgioioso d’Este, persuades her that only an operatic career would fully exploit her gifts. Scarpia, the villain in Tosca, is the much more likable main character here. A member of the lesser nobility, this young Sicilian is drummed out of the Spanish army for insubordinate acts of derring-do. He makes his way to Rome, where he's offered a respectable if less-than-adventurous post with the papal guards. As revolution overtakes France, he's sent to Venice to assess that city’s readiness for French anti-royalist aggression. There, he has a brief romantic encounter with Tosca. Back in Rome, Scarpia enjoys the patronage of the pope’s treasurer, Ruffo, who educates him in the internecine intrigues and pitfalls of Roman society and ultimately negotiates a marriage for him to a princess, Paola. Scarpia and Paola both welcome the match, and to place them on an equal footing, the pope elevates him to the rank of baron. Napoleon’s star rises and his forces conquer Rome, exacting a high price in fines and works of art from both the papacy and the nobility. Paola falls prey to the blandishments of a sinister French portrait painter, while Scarpia is exiled, triggering the events detailed in the opera. A character list is sorely needed, and often, story and conflict struggle to stay afloat in a deluge of exposition.
Overly ornate though engrossing depiction of a tumultuous period in Italian history, when the French looted Italian treasures for the Louvre and deposed the pope.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-324-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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
PROFILES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
