Pleasantly soporific.
A young widow immerses herself in antiquity and uncovers a scandal in Alexander’s Victorian-era suspense debut.
Emily married Philip, a wealthy viscount, mainly to escape her overbearing mother’s constant hectoring. Her new husband has two passions: acquiring ancient Greek vases and statuary, and big-game hunting. Shortly after their marriage, Philip leaves Emily in their London townhouse and embarks on an extended African safari. His fellow hunters, impoverished aristocrats Andrew and Arthur Palmer and best friend Colin Hargreaves, report that he died of a mysterious fever at camp. Widowed after only six months of marriage to a man she hardly knew, Emily is relieved and secretly exhilarated by her inherited fortune and the independence it offers. But she soon sees signs that Philip had had things to hide. A man with a scarred face stalks her while she is inspecting the antiquities her husband donated to the British Museum. Philip’s desk and her Paris hotel room are ransacked. Colin, to whom she is attracted, is frustratingly unforthcoming about Philip’s business dealings—and his own. Andrew, who at first charms Emily with his debonair cynicism about society, and his acceptance of her rebellions (drinking port instead of sherry, studying ancient Greek), turns hostile when she rejects his proposal. At the Louvre, she befriends Attewater, an expert forger who specializes in copying classical artifacts on commission. However, he will not identify his well-heeled patrons. Emily learns from this unsavory acquaintance that Philip’s British Museum gifts are actually copies and the originals are stockpiled at his country estate. Then word comes through that Philip may actually be alive. Emily, who has fallen in love with her husband after reading his journal (sections of it introduce each chapter), prepares to go on safari to search for him. Following a long buildup, the payoff is rather too predictable, and the opulence insulating Emily insures that she’s never truly in jeopardy.
Pleasantly soporific.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-075671-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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