Densely textured but slow-moving, with a mystery whose tangled mess of multiple plots and plotters is only partly resolved...
Giordano Bruno, the excommunicated monk attached to both the French embassy and the spy network of Sir Francis Walsingham, is lured to Canterbury by still another troubled attachment.
In 1584, Bruno thinks he’s put Sophia Underhill, whom he loved in vain in Heresy (2010, etc.), behind him. And so he has, but only in the sense that she’s dogging his steps in London disguised as a boy. When he recognizes her, she appeals once more for his help. Sir Edward Kingsley, the much older magistrate to whom her aunt married her off after an illegitimate child exiled her from the life she’d known, has been brained with a crucifix in Canterbury Cathedral under conditions that echo the martyrdom of Thomas Becket and make Sophia the obvious suspect. Only Bruno, she insists, can vindicate her by unmasking her hated husband’s killer. Under protest, Bruno persuades Walsingham to dispatch him to Canterbury, ostensibly to report back on the doings of Dr. Harry Robinson, the spymaster’s man inside the Cathedral Chapter, but secretly accompanied by Sophia, still disguised as Kit. He soon identifies several other promising suspects: Sir Edward’s wastrel son Nicholas; physician/alchemist Dr. Ezekiel Sykes; and cathedral gatekeeper Tom Garth, whose sister Sarah died in the Kingsley home nine years ago under mysterious circumstances. In the meantime, however, Bruno stumbles into much deeper waters, from the disappearances of a number of young boys to a plot to revive the Becket cult, dormant ever since the disappearance of the saint’s bones, to a conspiracy involving the alchemical theories of Paracelsus and Hermes Trismegistus. Instead of flying below the radar, as Walsingham bade him, Bruno finds himself swiftly making influential enemies as well.
Densely textured but slow-moving, with a mystery whose tangled mess of multiple plots and plotters is only partly resolved by Bruno’s trial for murder, attempted murder and larceny.Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-53547-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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