In a substantial shift from her recent fantasy/horror efforts (Darkness, I, 1996, etc.), Lee turns to the dreams and horrors of the French Revolution to give a sexually charged, if massive, account of its first citizens. (See also Marge Piercy's latest, below.) Narrated by firebrand Camille Desmoulins, whose words from tabletop and printing press helped spark the Revolution's triumphs, the story begins just before the storming of the Bastille. By means of a single speech at a pivotal moment and a manifesto published soon after, little-known, impoverished Camille sets the Paris mob in motion, earning the sobriquet ``Author of the Revolution.'' A number of figures attempt to harness or exploit Camille's fame— most prominent among them being Danton, larger than life, who takes Camille under his wing, sharing ideas and prostitutes with him in equal measure. Camille's newfound glory also convinces the lovely Lucile's father to agree to their marriage, giving Camille the prize of his dreams as well as an unshakable advocate at his side. The triumph of toppling the king is paralleled by Lucile's giving birth to a son, but in the hard days to follow, with enemies of the Republic gathering outside and inside its borders, with Paris starving, and with factions within the new government increasingly at each other's throats, Camille has little cause for rejoicing. As heads roll in increasing numbers, including those of friends, he is torn by old loyalties and the desire to maintain his own fiery influence on the public mood. Inevitably, Camille is destroyed by the Revolution he helped begin and is sent with Danton to the guillotine—knowing that his cause is doomed and that his beloved Lucile will very likely follow him shortly. A familiar story, certainly, but told with feeling and force: The private lives and thoughts of Camille and his contemporaries emerge in ways both credible and compelling, giving this version of the French Revolution a distinctive aura of personal tragedy. (First printing of 50,000; $30,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Nov. 25, 1996
ISBN: 0-87951-672-0
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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