An intoxicating look inside a world of innovative new media.
A bright, appealing novel about the early days of the BBC and the women behind its brilliant programming.
When Maisie Musgrave finds a job as a secretary at the new, and rather controversial, British Broadcasting Corporation, she’s grateful: Maisie is a plain, inexperienced girl, and in the years after the first world war, employment can be hard to find. At first, she feels out of place at the BBC; the halls are abuzz, the employees flush with excitement over the new technology. Stratford (The Moonlight Brigade, 2011, etc.) is wonderful in her depictions of that ferment, the democratizing new media which broadcasts information to masses of people: “From Penzance to John o’Groats, anyone who had a wireless and the license fee could tune in and hear a symphony, poetry, gardening advice, a thriller, a debate, scenes from new plays, sporting events, stories about places scattered throughout the globe, because why shouldn’t a farmwife in South Yorkshire know something of Shanghai, or San Francisco, or São Paulo?” Soon, Maisie finds a mentor in the brilliant and charismatic Hilda Matheson, director of the Talks Department, which broadcasts lectures on nearly every subject imaginable, from literature to politics to gardening. The BBC is one of the only companies to allow female employees to advance beyond the secretarial level, and Hilda is radiant in her prominent position. She’s also kind and exceedingly generous toward the young Maisie, who begins to follow in her footsteps. It isn’t long before Maisie is promoted and finds her ambitions expanding beyond the husband and family that were once all she yearned for. This depiction of female friendship and support is one of the great strengths of Stratford’s novel, which so capably describes its characters’ thirst for knowledge, for information of all kinds. But the book falters when it ventures into a conspiracy involving British fascists, secret meetings, and MI5. Maisie’s attempts at sleuthing strain belief. Still, the novel is so energetic and fresh, it more than makes up for its missteps.
An intoxicating look inside a world of innovative new media.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-47556-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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