Great reading for a flight to Paris. Just stay away from witches, bathtubs and maybe the Metro once you get there—oh, and...
Mix up Mad Men, Russian folklore, James Bond, An American in Paris, Gorky Park and maybe a hint of Franz Kafka, and you get something like, well, this decidedly odd and most entertaining sophomore novel by Barlow (Sharp Teeth, 2008).
Will Van Wyck is anything but an ugly American, but he’s a bit at sea in the City of Lights. An adman par excellence back home, he’s been slowly stripped of his accounts, ignored at brainstorming sessions where his French counterparts are hopping about to jingles of “Chase your pimples away. Chase your pimples away.” But pimples dissolve, and so do mortals, in the face of the supernatural, as represented by the dazzling, chest-heaving Zoya, whose lover wonders how it is that she manages to stay so young; she hasn’t changed a day since the liberation—or, for that matter, since the Franco-Prussian War, for all we know. Zoya’s got the zazzle of immortality thanks to being turned by a resourceful and oftentimes very bad witch named Elga, who turns up in the story just when mischief is needed, as when said lover winds up in the great beyond and a police detective makes his way to her door, only to be turned into a flea for his troubles. Naturally, Will meets Zoya. Naturally, she puts the zap on him: “There was an essence to her gaze—the way her eyes connected with his—that took the simplest words in his mind and effortlessly broke them down into small, useless heaps of letters.” Meanwhile, Will’s best pal in Paris turns out to be a CIA spook, and there’s all kinds of hijinks to be had there, as, undeterred, Inspector Vidot tours the demimondes of Paris by hitching rides on mangy critters, and Zoya stays a step ahead of the law, the KGB and everyone else who’s got an interest in her wiles. Barlow’s story is goofy, wholly original and a lot of fun, and he ably captures the feel of both the gray 1950s and free-spirited France.
Great reading for a flight to Paris. Just stay away from witches, bathtubs and maybe the Metro once you get there—oh, and spooks, too.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-10787-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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
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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