Rather sloppy, but Thomas fans may embrace this latest effort.
British author Thomas (The Illusionists, 2014, etc.) brings back the Wix family, entertainers who own London’s Palmyra theater, and focuses on the daughter’s story in this historical romance set in the early 20th century and beyond.
Since surviving the sinking of a pleasure steamer during a family excursion, psychically gifted 13-year-old Nancy Wix occasionally sees images of a young victim. Worse, rescued passenger Lawrence Feather pops up at random times, intent on convincing Nancy to channel her powers and communicate with his beloved sister, a passenger who drowned on the cruise. Nancy’s repelled by him and uncomfortable that he recognizes her connection with the Uncanny (as she calls the supernatural world), something she’s never revealed to her parents. Her mother, Eliza, is frail, and her father, Devil, is always busy scheming to keep the Palmyra afloat. Her parents’ relationship is stormy, but the two remain devoted to one another; Nancy, though, often feels alienated from both. They focus their efforts on younger brother Arthur’s future by enrolling him in elite schools and encouraging him to mingle with the upper class. Nancy knows her parents have no such hopes for her eldest brother, Cornelius, or herself, but she’s determined to follow her own path. In her 20s, she becomes involved with Feather's godson, Lion, but abandons conventional expectations to be with the love of her life, wealthy businessman Gil Maitland. Nancy also finds herself slipping into the role of parent while her mother and father become mired in destructive behaviors. To help keep her family afloat, she seeks out Feather—who uses his own weak psychic abilities and knowledge of human gullibility to conduct séances for paying audiences—becomes his student and protégé, and then leaves him to establish her own show at the Palmyra. Thomas focuses more on plot development and characterization in her current offering than she did in the prequel, and she almost manages to pull off an absorbing historical romance. She creates a dynamic protagonist involved in an uncertain romance, and her other principal characters are equally well-rounded. But her heavily ornate style of writing, combined with long superfluous passages and terminology unfamiliar to many readers, detracts from the overall quality of the story.
Rather sloppy, but Thomas fans may embrace this latest effort.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1174-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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