The writing is only serviceable, but this jam-packed narrative unfolds at a brisk clip—even if, in the end, the convoluted...
Historical fiction meets real estate porn in this tale revolving around Manhattan’s storied Dakota apartment building.
Davis (The Dollhouse, 2016) tells two, eventually intertwining, stories that take place 100 years apart. In 1884, Sara Smythe is head housekeeper at London’s Langham Hotel when she accepts an offer to work at the Dakota, just opening in the wilds of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The very notion of upper-class families living in shared space had been considered gauche, but the Dakota—a “communal living experiment,” as one of the characters puts it—becomes a showpiece for affluent families who can’t afford a Fifth Avenue mansion. In 1985, New York City interior designer Bailey Camden has just been sprung from rehab only to learn that her former employer doesn’t want her back. She gets a commission from her friend Melinda (a sort of relation—but that’s a long story), who owns an apartment in the Dakota. Unfortunately, Melinda’s renovation ideas are painfully out of step with the Gilded Age grandeur of the building. Back in the 1880s, Sara gets involved with married architect Theodore Camden and winds up in an insane asylum on Blackwell (now Roosevelt) Island. The real-life pioneering reporter Nellie Bly engineers her release, and Sara returns to the Dakota only to be accused of a grisly crime. Bailey, meanwhile, stumbles across some strange artifacts at the Dakota that will link her, inextricably, to Sara. Though her characters lack depth, the author does a good job showing how tough it could be for women in the 19th century. At the same time, the historical asides about old New York and the Dakota’s beginnings are fun to read.
The writing is only serviceable, but this jam-packed narrative unfolds at a brisk clip—even if, in the end, the convoluted plot turns have a dizzying effect.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4199-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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