Deserves front-runner status in the saturated field of Austen fan-fiction and film.
A worthy attempt to augment Jane Austen’s love life.
Austen’s short life is well documented by her surviving letters—except for the period 1809 through 1812, which preceded publication of her first novel, Sense and Sensibility. James re-imagines this time in the form of a “lost memoir” discovered in an attic chest, along with a gold-and-ruby ring. The “missing years” are emotionally and financially fraught for Jane. There’s her first marriage proposal, from boorish, stammering Harris, the son and heir to the Bigg-Wither country estate. She accepts, seeing a means of procuring her mother’s and sisters’ security, but reneges the next day. Upon her father’s death, Jane and the other distaff Austens must vacate their family home. The women, dependent on male relatives, now exist on the fringes of genteel respectability. While traveling with her brother Henry, Jane meets Frederick Ashford, son of a baronet and heir to a huge fortune, with a stately home to match. Jane and winsome 34-year-old Frederick share a love of literature, a proclivity for intellectual discourse and a sense of humor. Dare she hope that he finds her enthralling despite her limited wardrobe, relatively plain face and age verging on intractable spinsterhood—32? She dares. He’s called away suddenly, but the two meet again for a three-week idyll of diffident courtship. He’s on the verge of a declaration when meddlesome friends interrupt. Later, Jane learns, to her horror, that Frederick is engaged to a 17-year-old heiress, Isabella. Why did he allow Jane to cherish false hopes? She staunchly refuses his letters. Finally, Frederick confronts Jane at a London society party and reveals that his engagement was parentally dictated. There’s hope—Isabella wants out. Suspense builds, and it’s a tribute to the world James creates that readers will anxiously root for Jane to find true love and wealth even though we know it never happened.
Deserves front-runner status in the saturated field of Austen fan-fiction and film.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-134142-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avon A/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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