Martin parses personal and social politics with methodical care and a reserved tone reminiscent of Edith Wharton.
Yes, the narrator of Martin’s new novel is a middle-aged American woman vacationing in Tuscany, but this prickly, uncomfortably relevant dive into personal and societal ethics is no escapist romance.
Creative writing professor Jan Vidor stays at Villa Chiara as a paying guest for the first time during the summer of 1983. The villa’s owner is Beatrice, herself a professor at an unnamed American college. Beatrice’s last name, Doyle, comes from her failed marriage to a Cape Cod oysterman’s son she met while attending graduate school at Boston College, but she was born into a family of aristocrats who split their time between Florence and their country estate, Villa Chiara. During more visits together over the next 20 years, Beatrice shares tales with Jan, connecting family history to 20th-century Italian history, particularly the Fascist era. Jan sees the family’s central tragedy as the death of Uncle Sandro, a gentle romantic who spent much of his adult life in an insane asylum but died violently under murky circumstances outside the villa in 1943. Believing Beatrice has given her permission to use the family stories, Jan writes them into a book; chapters become a novel within the novel here. Jan’s narrative pits innocence (spiritual, idealistic Sandro) against evil (his Fascist, capitalistic, misogynistic brother Marco). Yet the changes she witnesses at the villa and in Beatrice over time reveal harsh realities about class and capitalism in Italy (and America). Beatrice, the novel’s true central enigma, originally went to America to reinvent herself through education. She married but never took her working-class ex-husband seriously and continues to have problematic relationships with her mother and her son, who paradoxically has chosen to live in Germany. Yet after spending most of her life in America, Beatrice remains an outsider there while her identity as Italian landed gentry seems to crystallize as the working-class locals her family has patronized for generations take financial control.
Martin parses personal and social politics with methodical care and a reserved tone reminiscent of Edith Wharton.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54639-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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