A captivating tale of survival and love full of rich period details.
A dancing girl weathers exile, palace intrigues, and horrendous childbirths on her way to becoming queen of Cambodia in this historical romance.
Whitfield sets her engrossing novel in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, when Kampuchea under the historical King Jayavarman VII encompassed Cambodia and much of Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand. Centering the story is Preah Chan Bopha, a peasant girl who is a prodigy of Apsara, a dance form with stately footwork and intricate hand gestures. Recruited for the royal dance troupe, Bopha is whisked off to Apsara school in the capital Angkor just months before her family is killed by foreign invaders. After years of studying, performing, and swooning over the handsome king, she is summoned to the palace to become Jayavarman’s lover and, eventually, he promises, his fourth wife. Unfortunately, Jayavarman takes offense at a stray remark of hers and exiles her to a village. There, a hellish pregnancy culminates in an agonizing delivery in the middle of a thunderstorm during which a falling tree crushes her house. Mother and twin boys pull through thanks to a midwife and the Hindu eagle god Garuda, whose voice reassures Bopha in times of trouble. A contrite Jayavarman recalls her to Angkor for a wedding in which she parades to the altar atop an elephant. But Queen Bopha faces more challenges, including the enmity of the senior queen and an attempt on the king’s life. Whitfield’s well-observed portrait of medieval Khmer culture explores everything from cuisine—staples include dried fish and crickets—to the brusque funerals in which the deceased is tossed into a ravine and devoured by vultures. But there’s also a universality to Bopha’s experiences: grieving loved ones; discovering sex and motherhood; learning to assert herself in a man’s world. Whitfield conveys all this in limpid prose that conjures poetic insights out of simple details. (“I only saw my mother smile once….The rice was boiling and she moved it to where the coals weren’t so hot. Then she just squatted there, her face soft. She was far, far away. Then, I saw it. She smiled. It lit up her face….Maybe she had been beautiful at one time, before marriage, before children.”) The result is a nice blend of striking setting and resonant pathos.
A captivating tale of survival and love full of rich period details.Pub Date: Dec. 23, 2021
ISBN: 9798784990266
Page Count: 433
Publisher: PonderosaSage
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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