Entertaining escapism but a too-obvious pastiche of classic literary memes.
Rindell, who exhibited her own skill at noir romances in The Other Typist (2013), borrows heavily from Charlotte Brontë, du Maurier, and Hitchcock in this gothic yarn about secrets not shared by a young wife and her wealthy older husband.
When the San Francisco orphanage where she lives mysteriously burns down, 13-year-old Violet and two older friends—flashy Cora and common-sensical Flossie—end up in a bordello run by Mr. Tackett, who hires the 16-year-olds as dancehall girls and mousy, sensitive Violet as a maid. Two unhappy years later, Violet finds miserly, vicious Tackett dead from a suspiciously violent stomach ailment. Violet, who suffers from strange blackout spells, has reason to worry he’s been poisoned. Serendipitously, the 1906 earthquake occurs almost immediately, leveling the bordello with the dead man inside and leaving his money for Violet, Cora, and Flossie to divide. Reinventing herself as a respectable shop girl, Violet is wooed by dashing, wealthy Harry Carlyle, whom Rindell could easily have named Edward Rochester or Maxim de Winter. Harry’s first wife, Madeleine, evidently died in the earthquake. Or did she? Harry and Violet agree not to discuss their pasts, one of the novel’s many convenient contrivances. Despite Cora’s grouchy disapproval, Violet marries Harry with Flossie’s support. Enter prune-faced housekeeper Miss Weber. Whether jealous over Harry or loyal to Madeleine, she makes Violet’s life miserable in all the ways readers of Victorian melodrama know well. Meanwhile, strange nocturnal events of the standard tinkling piano and lit candle variety lead Violet to fear a ghost is stalking her. Given Harry’s flashes of temper and Violet’s insecure curiosity, the marriage understandably becomes strained. Then Harry is hospitalized for—guess what—stomach problems! Is he being poisoned, and, if so, by whom? Who may not be whom they seem? Who is a criminal? Or a ghost? Since everything revolves around secrets and distrust, readers may gleefully assume they shouldn’t trust Violet as narrator. Or should they?
Entertaining escapism but a too-obvious pastiche of classic literary memes.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53920-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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