As melodramatic and stagy as any opera, but without the compensations of music and singers.
Cohen’s debut takes a popular Victorian theme—destitute young woman rescued by older man with rakish past—and tweaks it for current preoccupations, adding pedophilia and anti-Semitism to a story that’s more sensational melodrama than romance.
Set in the early 1890s, the tale has trademark Wharton details—Mrs. Astor is still giving parties; money as much as love is the stuff of gossip, and reputations can be destroyed by the smallest indiscretion—but, like the décor in present-day theme restaurants, these seem contrived and artificial. All begins as Mario Alfieri, a famous Italian tenor, arrives to make his debut at the Metropolitan Opera. In his 40s and unmarried, Mario is a noted womanizer. Wanting some privacy, he decides to rent a house and is shown one facing Gramercy Park. The property of the recently deceased Henry Slade, it’s just what he wants—but then, exploring, he encounters, hidden in the music room, a sickly looking girl. Sensing her underlying beauty, Mario is instantly smitten. The girl is 20-year old Clara Adler, the mysterious Jewish ward of the late Mr. Slade and thought to be his heir until his will revealed otherwise. Naturally, Mario, who decides he wants to marry Clara, has to contend with a wicked and wily adversary: Slade’s lawyer, the sinister Thaddeus Chadwick, with his own dastardly plans for Clara. Though Mario whisks Clara away from the house and marries her, he discovers that she has a troubled past—which, soon revealed, makes the rest of the tale an anticlimactic race to bring Chadwick to justice. Clara, Mario learns, was seduced at age 11 by a pedophiliac headmaster; she is also haunted by dreams of murder and mayhem, which the loving Mario must confront, ditto for threats to his reputation and career.
As melodramatic and stagy as any opera, but without the compensations of music and singers.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-27552-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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