Biographer (Robert Graves, 1995; Ottoline Morrell, 1993) Seymour offers the tale of one Nancy Brewster, whose unstable life is blown out of the water (and into an asylum) by the unscrupulous Isabel March, a character based on the poet Laura Riding. The central event that we wait (and wait) for here is the 1939 stealing of Nancy Brewster’s putatively brilliant literary husband Chance by the putatively brilliant Isabel March/Laura Riding. Isabel has come to the Brewsters as a long-term houseguest, bringing her English non-husband Charles Neville, based on the poet Robert Graves, who in real life did live with Laura Riding but who could be eliminated here (he does in fact just go away) without loss. The sources of Nancy Brewster’s vulnerability are in no doubt as Seymour invents for her a deeply repressed childhood in Boston, a family who adored her brother but neglected her, a frigid mother, and a father who smothered Nancy with a pillow in order to molest her. Strange it can hardly be that Nancy at 18, when she’s moved to New York and marries the penurious but brainy Princeton grad Chance Brewster in 1925, is still afraid of the dark and has problems with sex. History repeats itself, too, when, like her own mother, Nancy dislikes the daughter born as her first child but adores the second, a son. When a beloved uncle dies and the Brewsters move to his big old house—Nancy’s one childhood Eden—on the sea near Salem, Mass., things seem bucolic on the outside, but when the imperious Isabel arrives and begins to steal Chance away, Nancy breaks down amid the symbols of war, witch-hunts, black magic, and danger gathered about her. Appealing glimpses of the day’s East Coast literary life (watch Edmund Wilson take a whipping), but credibility is strained as the psychology of characters is simplified to fit the tale that needs to be told.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04806-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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