Although the contemporary story becomes an annoying distraction, Davenport does right by Rembrandt and his genius—and that...
Rembrandt in England, locked in a fierce struggle with the poet Andrew Marvell for artistic preeminence—and the attentions of a beautiful woman: all in this outing from Davenport (a.k.a. British thriller writer James Long: Silence and Shadows, 2001, etc.).
It’s 1662, and the 56-year-old Rembrandt is bankrupt. Fleeing his creditors, the notorious homebody becomes an accidental stowaway on a ship bound for Hull (the evidence for Rembrandt’s residence in England is flimsy, but Davenport, otherwise, stays close to the historical record). Ship’s captain Dahl promises to pay Rembrandt’s passage home if he likes the portrait he has commissioned. Dahl’s intermediary is another passenger, the Dutch-speaking Marvell, at first glance a self-important parliamentarian. Painting the captain is a tedious chore; painting his wife, the beautiful Amelia, the challenge of a lifetime. And Marvell gives Rembrandt the opportunity. Working in different mediums, each man will pay tribute to Amelia’s beauty, and the subject herself will decide the winner. This may all sound rather loopy, and the identification of Amelia as the Coy Mistress of Marvell’s most famous poem may be several degrees too cute, but it works surprisingly well on the page. Davenport finds a convincing voice for Rembrandt, and the artistic rivalry becomes all the juicier thanks to the serenely manipulative Amelia. What works far less well is a storyline set in 2001 that gets equal time. Here, hot-blooded young artist Amy Dale, a descendant of Dahl’s, joins a crew that’s restoring the grand country house once built by Amelia. Amy seduces her scarred but sexy co-worker Don, who may or may not be bad news. The two stumble on Rembrandt’s wall paintings, but their subsequent sleuthing never blends with a surrounding melodrama that churns out two murders and one near-miss (all, curiously, involving a chain saw).
Although the contemporary story becomes an annoying distraction, Davenport does right by Rembrandt and his genius—and that gives his fantasy a glow of its own.Pub Date: April 29, 2003
ISBN: 0-553-38206-3
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
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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