Stock characters and predictable situations, not worth revisiting in the promised sequel involving younger sister Gabrielle.
Carroll’s latest romance (The Bride Finder, 1998, etc.) fulfills the generic rules in pedestrian fashion, swinging back to a time of witchery in France on the eve of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
Carroll tones down the complicated Protestant-Catholic conflict against which her fable of the highborn Cheney sisters is set. In 1572, eldest sister Ariane is “the Lady of Faire Isle” and leader of the island’s “Daughters of the Earth,” otherwise known as witches. The girls’ mother, a famous healer, died of a broken heart when her husband was wooed away by the conniving black magic of the dowager queen, Catherine de Medici. Catherine’s latest plot involves a pair of poisoned gloves she used to kill Henry of Navarre’s mother. (Jeanne of Navarre had planned to call off her son’s marriage to Catherine’s daughter, suspecting that the truce being negotiated between the Protestants and Catholics was a ruse.) A wounded captain of Henry’s Huguenot army takes refuge among the sisters at Faire Isle, holding the gloves as proof of Catherine’s black artistry. This leads the “Dark Queen” to unleash her fury on the Cheney sisters. Meanwhile, Carroll employs every trick in the romance book to portray the courtship of serene-eyed Ariane by her uncouth, irresistibly virile neighbor, Comte de Renard, whose forebears were also versed in the magic arts. With a ring he blackmails her into wearing, Ariane is able to summon Renard instantly whenever she is in distress—three times during the course of the narrative. It’s all utterly conventional. Our swooning, virtuous heroine is never too assertive to be invulnerable to the count’s superior strength. Her rake is handily tamed. Her sisters provide pat counterpoint: One is sweet, one sour and suspicious. The prose is forgettable, and the backdrop would have been compelling only if Carroll had resisted dumbing it down for her readers.
Stock characters and predictable situations, not worth revisiting in the promised sequel involving younger sister Gabrielle.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-43796-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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
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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