The novel doesn’t quite reach the depths of its potential, but Price is a novelist worth watching.
A young woman navigates the aftermath of her rape in young British novelist Price’s sensitive debut.
In her first week of university, Kate Quaile meets Max Rippon—a rom-com–style serendipitous encounter—and the two bond immediately. Theirs is a deep and blissfully uncomplicated friendship. The fact that Max comes from great wealth—an aristocratic father and a famous film director mother—and Kate, raised by a single mom, comes from nothing of note hardly factors into their lives. Max “wasn’t worried about what he might lose,” Kate realizes early in their friendship, “because he’d always had more than enough.” Over the next four years, their friendship—which manages to avoid most common collegiate pitfalls, like romance, or jealousy, or conflict at all—only deepens, as Kate, now an aspiring filmmaker herself, becomes a frequent guest of Max’s family. And then, at a party at Max’s parents’ house, the summer after their graduation, Kate is assaulted and tells no one. A rift opens: As Kate struggles to cope with the impact of the violence, Max is busy with his new London life, which mostly involves partying and half-baked ideas for apps. Eventually, though, Kate, wracked by silence, begins to share her secret—or at least, parts of it. But speaking up, too, has a cost. Though Price spends significant time documenting the repressed angst of the Rippon clan, the novel is strongest when Kate, whose evolving emotional state—her depression and panic giving way to waves of rage—is both the heart and spine of the book. But while the novel is thoughtful and observant about privilege and power, it is not, on the whole, especially insightful about those topics, and the result is a story that feels just a touch too familiar. Despite Price’s careful accounting of their dynamics, the characters here—even Kate, who comes alive in the final few pages—feel oddly nonspecific, without the interests or quirks or internal inconsistencies that differentiate individuals from well-illustrated types.
The novel doesn’t quite reach the depths of its potential, but Price is a novelist worth watching.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984824-41-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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