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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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