A captivating story, though Llywelyn’s idealization of the Republican cause can lead her to play fast and loose with some...
Third installment—1916 (1998), 1921 (2001)—in Llywelyn’s series about modern Ireland.
Earlier, we met Republicans Ned Halloran and Henry Mooney, who fought (as courier and journalist, respectively) to support the doomed 1916 Easter Rising. Now, in the aftermath of the 1921 Partition that divided Ireland into two states, Halloran and Mooney are bitter men. Mooney is so disillusioned, in fact, that he emigrates to Texas and sets up his own newspaper. But first he pays for the education, in Switzerland, of Halloran’s daughter Ursula and helps her find work in the Irish Civil Service when she graduates. Ursula is every inch her father’s girl—fiercely independent and a Republican to the marrow. She takes a job with the newly formed Radio Éireann and eventually becomes Ireland’s first woman broadcaster. Her position gives her a privileged insight into the complicated relations between world events and Irish politics, and she watches with growing satisfaction as the Irish President Eamon De Valera takes advantage of the turmoil of the 1930s to wrest more and more concessions from the British. Soon, however, Ursula finds herself in a crisis of her own making when she realizes she’s pregnant—and unsure whether the father is the dull Finbar Cassidy or the dashing Lewis Banes. In order to escape the opprobrium faced by unwed mothers, Ursula moves to Geneva and takes a job with the League of Nations. There, she witnesses the inevitable eruption of WWII as she gives birth to her son Barry. She returns home toward the end of the war (or the Emergency, as it was known in neutral Ireland) and raises Barry on her father’s farm in County Clare. The climax comes in 1949, when Ireland (minus Ulster, of course) is proclaimed a fully independent republic.
A captivating story, though Llywelyn’s idealization of the Republican cause can lead her to play fast and loose with some shadier aspects of modern Irish politics.Pub Date: March 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-86753-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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