Covering little more than a third of Sofi’s life, this love-obsessed narrative leaves plenty of room for a sequel, but no...
YA author Cullen’s foray into adult fiction features a groundbreaking female Renaissance painter but doesn’t give her much to do.
Sofonisba Anguissola’s father, an impoverished Genoan count, bucked convention to secure her the finest artistic training. Now Sofi, who signs her work Virgo, is studying in Rome with Michelangelo. She takes advantage of her chaperone Francesca’s ill-advised absence one day in 1559 to consummate her infatuation with Tiberio, another of the maestro’s apprentices. Their tryst is interrupted (too late for Sofi’s virginity) by Michelangelo himself, and shortly thereafter Francesca whisks her disgraced charge back home to Cremona. Languishing in hopes of a proposal from Tiberio, Sofi receives instead a summons from the court of Felipe II of Spain. The king engages her as a drawing instructor and lady-in-waiting to his new bride, Elisabeth de Valois, 14-year-old daughter of Henri II of France. Sofi’s artistic aspirations and thwarted longing for Tiberio are quickly overshadowed by Elisabeth’s travails. Felipe eschews marital relations until she attains puberty, then waits patiently for her to conceive a child. Her mother, dragon-lady Catherine de Medici, tries to micromanage the marriage from afar. Soon, Sofi is Elisabeth’s most trusted confidante, supplanting less loyal courtiers like Felipe’s disgruntled sister Doña Juana and his mistress Eufrasia. The young queen is surrounded by a cadre of attractive young men, including the king’s handsome young half brother, Don Juan (no relation to the legendary rake). He captures Elisabeth’s heart, and their love threatens to doom both the queen and her allies. The author neglects Sofi’s artistic and personal development in favor of a more conventional emphasis on romance—mostly a spectator sport for the painter at the Spanish court.
Covering little more than a third of Sofi’s life, this love-obsessed narrative leaves plenty of room for a sequel, but no one’s likely to be terribly interested unless it offers a more three-dimensional portrait of the artist.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 0425238709
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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