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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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