Miller's debut, an unusual but uneven cautionary tale cloaked in a historical novel, features a cold-blooded English surgeon, literally a freak of nature, who works wonders in the mid-18th century until being spectacularly undone by his pride. Born of his mother's adultery in the midst of a moonlit midwinter skating party, James Dyer is marked by that icy violation: He utters not a sound and is completely numb to pain, whether his or anyone else's. The first condition lasts only a few years, so that he can speak by the time his family is obliterated by smallpox. He learns to feign pain from a huckster who uses the boy's lack of sensation to sell snake oil medicine to crowds thrilled by seeing James pierced with needles. Rescued from this life by a mysterious, wealthy landowner, James soon discovers that he has become part of his patron's personal collection of freaks, but endures it until he observes an amateurish, lethal operation, sickening to everyone but himself, to separate Siamese twins who were also in the menagerie. He escapes to the Royal Navy, where his aptitude for surgical technique soon has him operating coolly in the heat of battle, then leaves the sea to set up a private practice in Bath. His reputation as a surgeon becomes as huge as his notoriety for coldness and greed. He is shunned in spite of his skills when he drives his wine-addled partner to suicide. Unruffled, James joins a wild race between English physicians to minister to the Empress of Russia, but en route he meets a witch in the woods, whereupon he loses the race but gains the ability to feel—a transformation inducing madness and necessitating a long, excruciatingly painful recovery. Vivid and precise in its isolated scenes, but suffering from a loose, ineffectual narrative. The result is a mere accumulation of arresting incidents rather than the taut, haunting story it could well have been.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-15-100258-4
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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