An engaging tale based on the life of an intriguing woman.
A historical novel focuses on the life of a groundbreaking scientist.
In this book, part of the Mentoris Project’s series celebrating noteworthy figures in Italian and Italian American history, Selbo explores the life of 18th-century polymath Laura Bassi. Bassi overcame barriers and prejudice to become the first woman to teach at the University of Bologna. The story opens with 5-year-old Laura asking challenging questions and showing her thirst for knowledge. She begins studying at home with tutors and demonstrates an aptitude for learning and an affinity for the new forms of scientific research that are being developed at the time. Although her mother worries that her daughter’s lack of interest in socializing will doom her to spinsterhood, Laura ends up marrying a fellow academic who supports her research and the laboratory that she establishes at home when the university does not allow her to work on its campus. The author blends lush historical details (“She walked down the center aisle, elegant in a deep blue beaded silk gown, her hairpieces studded with crystals and pearls”) with Laura’s more intellectual pursuits, maintaining a balance between creating the setting and examining more esoteric topics. The book skillfully invokes the Enlightenment themes that drive Laura’s work—science and religion, experiments versus theories, the pursuit of learning—developing them in the text as well as inserting them in characters’ conversations. Readers with limited historical backgrounds will have little trouble following the plot, as Selbo puts Laura’s letters to other prominent scientists, Roman Catholic Church politics, and the characters’ daily lives in the necessary context. The author also adds details and cameo appearances by historical figures who will be familiar to those with knowledge of the era. The novel hews closely to Bassi’s documented history and does an excellent job of plausibly and satisfyingly filling in the blanks of her story. The book is informative without being didactic and delivers an enjoyable narrative that also achieves its educational goals.
An engaging tale based on the life of an intriguing woman.Pub Date: April 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947431-29-4
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Barbera Foundation
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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