Entertaining and delicious Stuart-era scandalmongering.
The final installment of Borman’s lively trilogy—begun in The King's Witch (2018) and The Devil's Slave (2019)—about a secretly Catholic woman embedded in the treacherous court of King James I.
Frances, now mother of two sons, has again left her country retreat for James’ court, this time due to her own mixed concern and longing for her husband, Sir Thomas Tyringham, whose duties as master of buckhounds keep him locked into the busy royal hunting schedule. At court, excitement mounts thanks to an element the first two volumes of this series lacked: a truly diabolical antagonist. Frances is not exactly welcome at court—in fact, ladies-in-waiting have no function since Queen Anne now lives apart from the king. James’ closest and most powerful advisers are now his male “favourites”—and the newest and most virulently scheming of these is George Villiers. Thanks to his angelic looks, seductive charm, and complete lack of scruples, Villiers is soon the king’s de facto consort, garnering the Order of the Garter and a dukedom along the way. Villiers is vicious to anyone in that way, including Thomas, whose work life Villiers, as master of horse, makes miserable—he is the ultimate bad boss. Villiers is also responsible for the loss of Frances’ pregnancy when he deliberately causes her to fall. Despite this, and Villiers’ threats to leverage her deepest secrets against her, Frances seems remarkably slow to anger, and the lengthy timeline dilutes the conflict—the action here spans 14 years. Also straining belief is the number of occasions Frances stumbles, unobserved, upon Villiers’ depraved assignations. Frances’ overriding aim is to restore Catholicism to England: In this she is joined by other closet Catholics, including the crown prince, Charles, and Kate, an heiress whom Villiers will stop at nothing, literally, to wed for her money. Scenes starring Villiers come alive as the other characters cope, ineffectually and overcautiously, with the viper in their midst.
Entertaining and delicious Stuart-era scandalmongering.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5761-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
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
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
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