More gripping entertainment from a seasoned professional.
Revisiting the interconnected-mysteries-separated-by-centuries setup that worked so well in The Island House (2012, etc.), Graeme-Evans sends an Australian adoptee searching for her birth mother to a castle on the England-Scotland border.
In 1321, Hundredfield is held by the Dieudonné family, arrogant descendants of the Norman invaders who are feared and hated by the Saxon peasantry. Godefroi, the current lord, has done little to improve matters by marrying the mysterious Lady Flore, said to be a sorceress, while keeping as her servant a local girl, Margaretta, who has borne his son. How can Jesse, in the hospital after being hit by a motorcycle on a June day in 1981 shortly after arriving in London from Sydney, know Hundredfield well enough to draw it with her left hand, even though she’s right-handed and can’t draw? It might seem a ridiculous coincidence to have Jesse’s doctor, Rory Brandon, recognize the castle because his mother worked for the owners—whose daughter happens to be Alicia, the cafe waitress who helped Jesse after the accident. But there are no coincidences in Graeme-Evans’ satisfyingly spooky tale, which turns on a pre-Christian cult of the mother goddess whose female acolyte, the Lady of the Forest, arrives in the woods near Hundredfield over the centuries in times of need and bears a daughter. Flore is one such otherworldly visitor, Margaretta reveals when the lady’s body vanishes after giving birth about halfway through the book—a red flag that will tell alert readers where the story is heading. This doesn’t seriously mar the tension Graeme-Evans builds as the 14th- and 20th-century stories alternate while moving toward violent climaxes followed by loving renewal in both. Unlike The Island House, the modern characters are not as compelling as their ancestors—yes, Jesse proves to have roots in the borderlands as well—but the expert unfolding of a complicated plot mostly compensates.
More gripping entertainment from a seasoned professional.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4361-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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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