For fans enmeshed in this intricate world, a welcome installment which those new to the series might find a bit too in media...
The 10th in Willig’s witty series about Napoleanic-era spies focuses on a far-from-drowsy chaperone.
Gwen, lady companion to Jane, aka the notorious English spy Pink Carnation, is enjoying her sojourn in Paris. There, she is not a pitied, unmarriageable spinster but a proficient and daring spy in her own right: She sallies forth at night disguised as a gentleman to learn, among other state secrets, what Napoleon’s foreign minister, Talleyrand, is up to with a certain opera diva, Aurelia Fiorila. Too abruptly, Jane and Gwen are recalled to England: Jane’s sister Agnes has disappeared from her boarding school. At the school, Gwen meets Col. Reid, who’s come from India to reunite with the daughters he sent to England to be educated years before. Now, his daughter Lizzy has gone missing along with Agnes. Reid assumes the girls have taken refuge with his older daughter Kat in Bristol. After journeying there and learning, to Reid’s dismay, that Kat is now taking in laundry and living in a hovel, Reid and Gwen are set upon by brigands. Although Gwen handily fights them off by deploying her sword parasol, Reid is wounded. Mutual attraction smolders as Gwen nurses Reid back to health. Back with Jane's family in Bath, Gwen is alarmed that Jane seems so susceptible to the blandishments of the Chevalier de la Tour d’Argent, who is either a double agent or a charlatan or both. The plot thickens when the colonel and Chevalier escort the two spies to an opera performance starring Fiorila. Gwen chronicles and exaggerates the exploits of her alter ego, Purple Plumeria, in a swashbuckling novel in progress, the Convent of Orsino. A present-day frame story features Colin, a descendent of the Pink Carnation, and his Harvard historian girlfriend, Eloise. The writing is acerbic, arch and funny, but the complex back story demands familiarity with the earlier books.
For fans enmeshed in this intricate world, a welcome installment which those new to the series might find a bit too in media res.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-451-41472-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: New American Library
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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