A sequel to the popular author's Lion of Ireland (1980), the story of Brian Boru, the late tenth-century Irish warrior king who drove out the Norsemen invaders and, for an eyeblink of time, united Erin. Here, his son Donough, after Brian's death in 1014, sets his sights on his father's crown. After the battle in which the Ari Ri (king) Brian was killed— a conflict brought about by King Sitric of Dublin, then urged on by the fierce Gormlaith, the wife whom Brian had exiled—Donough, at 15, is the only surviving prince. On his way to manhood and respect, he must deal with his half-brother Prince Toigue, older but with no heart and no ability as a warrior. With his own vacuous bride, Donough is uneasily established at Toigue's fort of Kincora (he's sure it's his) when in storms his mighty mother—a former beauty and terror of Ireland now bent on empire-building. Gormlaith detects king-stuff in Donough and has a hand in plots and plans until her final madness. Meanwhile, Donough is finding true love with Cera the druid, though the increasingly influential church is disapproving. Eventually, he'll take the long sea trip to Scotland to meet with his half-sister's husband Malcolm II (grandfather of Duncan of Macbeth fame) and return with an alliance, not only with Scotland but England, now under the rule of King Canute (``Canute is nothing short of brilliant,'' bubbles one noble). In Scotland, Gormlaith, in her golden years, is brassy-bold with King Malcolm, who succumbs, though she'll be longboated home mumbling about her only love, Brian Boru. Donough will be cheated of the crown, and there'll be war and war and war. At the last, Donough is given a choice—Cora or Tara. Straight bothered-hero fare, with grue, stone digs, and sword- and ax-play.
Pub Date: March 17, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-85700-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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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