1) "The Nightingale" by Kristin Hannah
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.
2) "The Accidental Empress" by Allison Pataki
A love match alters the course of the Habsburg dynasty in Pataki’s second novel (The Traitor's Wife, 2014).
In 1853, Elisabeth, known as “Sisi,” daughter of a Bavarian duke, accompanies her mother and older sister, Helene, to Vienna. The sisters’ redoubtable aunt, Archduchess Sophie, has arranged Helene’s betrothal to her son, Emperor Franz Joseph, who reigns over Austria, Germany, Hungary and most of central Europe. To Sophie’s alarm, Franz prefers the pretty, vivacious and athletic 15-year old Sisi to the shy, homely and studious Helene. After a gift-strewn engagement and lavish royal wedding, Sisi adjusts to the realities of wedded bliss among the monarchy: She has no privacy—every intimate detail’s observed and remarked upon by court spies—and a mother-in-law who's not about to brook any rivals for her son’s affection. When Sisi gives birth to two daughters, Sophie and Gisela, the archduchess complains of the lack of a male heir but happily appropriates the princesses, barring Sisi from any involvement in their upbringing. (The same will happen with Sisi’s ill-fated son, Prince Rudolf). Franz is preoccupied with affairs of state, dealing with rebellious upstarts like Hungary, Italy and Prussia, vassal nations eager to throw off the Habsburg yoke. Sisi is instrumental in healing the rift with Hungary, in part because this wildly popular empress has a special affection for the Hungarian people and landscape. On her first visit, she's captivated by the former rebel leader, dark, handsome Count Andrássy. However, young Sophie succumbs to a fever while in Budapest, feeding the archduchess’s propaganda campaign against Sisi’s maternal suitability. On her return to stultifying court life, Sisi is felled by depression but finally musters the will to stage a rebellion of her own. The plot doesn't stray far from the conventions of novels about royalty, exposing all the unsurprising human disappointments lurking behind the gilded façade.
Still, Pataki deserves kudos for choosing her subject matter well—Sisi’s life is ideal fictional fodder.
3) "Vanessa and Her Sister" by Priya Parmar
A devoted, emotionally intense portrait of the Bloomsbury group focuses in particular on sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, whose complicated relationship is tested to the breaking point by their competing affections for two men.
Plunging into her story—the lives, love affairs, intellectual debates, arguments and achievements of an extensive, creative group of English friends—Parmar (Exit the Actress, 2011) allows the background facts about her real-life characters to emerge as needed. The curious, comfortably middle-class ménage of the four orphaned Stephen siblings—Adrian, Thoby, Vanessa and Virginia—living together in a large house in central London in the early 20th century is the foundation of the book. It’s in this house that Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster and many others congregate for bohemian evenings. Bell falls in love with Vanessa; Strachey is a friend of Leonard Woolf, who will eventually return from the Colonies to marry Virginia. Narrated by Vanessa in diary format, punctuated, as if in a scrapbook, by letters, tickets, bills and postcards, this slice of fictional biography spans the years 1905-12, in particular the triangle that forms among Clive, Vanessa and her sister after the birth of the first Bell child. Vanessa, the artist, emerges as “an ocean of majestic calm,” almost infinitely tolerant of her sister, the writer, whose capricious, jealous nature, though tempered by intellectual brilliance and immense charm, tips over at times into madness and suicidal thoughts. This fictional Virginia is far less appealing than her sister, whose nuanced account of her shifting feelings for Clive and eventual love for another invites sympathy. Leonard Woolf’s arrival marks the beginning of the next episode in the group’s extraordinarily intertwined history.
Not exactly uncharted territory, but Parmar enters it with passion and precision, delivering a sensitive, superior soap opera of celebrated lives.
4) "Paris Red" by Maureen Gibbson
Manet’s muse ponders color, power, sex and love in vibrant 1860s Paris.
Based on the true relationship between artist Edouard Manet and model Victorine Meurent and set on the cusp of the impressionist revolution, Gibbon’s (Thief, 2010, etc.) novel explores this landmark time in art history through the eyes of the artist’s subject. Victorine lives and works with her best friend, Denise, for whom she harbors some secret attraction, until one day they encounter a mysterious and seductive stranger who turns out to be the famous painter. At first he seems interested in having both girls together (artistically and sexually), but it is Victorine, the quiet one, who harbors great hunger (both artistic and sexual), who sleeps with him and then leaves her friend and her old life in order to become Manet’s model, ultimately inspiring his Olympia. But Victorine, like any modern heroine, refuses to serve as mere object or even as mere inspiration. Instead, it is suggested that she's responsible for triggering the creative use of color that came to define the art of this period. Her voice is sometimes immature, but she's only 17, and her self-awareness and sexual awareness are both engaging and deep. Gibbon writes in a rather fragmented style, with short chapters that often end on a “poetic” statement. (“Whatever my body wants, I give her. Bitter things as well as sweet.”) Sometimes this makes the novel feel a bit spacey, but the overall effect is lyrical and fits the shabbily gorgeous Parisian setting. There's a lot of sex, but it tends to be tasteful and concerned with equal pleasure, and it’s more hinted at than described in detail.
Fans of art history, Paris and contemporary Künstleroman like Girl With a Pearl Earring will enjoy the new perspective and the strong female voice.
5) "Epitaph" by Mary Doria Russell
Russell follows up her fictional portrait of Doc Holliday (Doc, 2011) with this fictional deconstruction of the shootout at the O.K. Corral.
While Doc Holliday’s charisma remains unrivaled, he becomes a kind of Greek chorus when Russell shifts her focus to Wyatt Earp, the ambivalent, morally ambiguous not-quite-hero of this Western Iliad; as Doc says after a gunfight in which Wyatt’s boot heel is shot off but he remains unharmed, “Achilles himself would have envied your luck.” By 1880, when Doc shows up, the Earp brothers have settled in Tombstone with their “wives”—Russell’s strongly drawn women are frontier survivors who take what security they can get whether officially legal or not. Also new in town is 18-year-old Josie Marcus, a nice Jewish runaway from San Francisco who's ended up the "wife” of Republican politician/businessman Johnny Behan. The Irish Yankee is competing with southern Democrat Wyatt Earp for sheriff. Their friendly political rivalry turns ugly once they begin competing for Josie as well. Meanwhile, big business interests behind the silver mines want to rid Tombstone of the local rustlers and petty criminals threatening the town’s reputation and the capitalists’ financial futures. The novel shifts effortlessly between intimate focus—for instance, Doc quietly teaching Josie a piano piece; actually, every scene with Doc or Josie is a bull’s eye—and a wide angle that captures President James Garfield’s assassination as well as the history of silver mining. The volatile mix of money, politics and personal vengeance intensifies in the months leading to the famous shootout and its less famous but brutal aftermath during which Wyatt loses his moral center. Eventually the novel becomes less violent but sadder and more realistic as Wyatt turns into a sullied victor on an odyssey toward Josie and pop-culture immortality.
Despite all that has been written and filmed about Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, Russell’s pointedly anti-epic anti-romance is so epic and romantic that it whets the reader’s appetite for more.
6) "Fiercombe Manor" by Kate Riordan
A Gothic English manor in a remote valley provides the backdrop to this tale of two pregnant women living 40 years apart.
Alice Eveleigh—a well-educated but romantically naïve office worker in 1933 London—has found herself pregnant by a married man. Her mother worries only about what the neighbors will think, so she shuttles Alice off to Fiercombe Manor, the ancient seat of the noble Stanton family, where her mother’s childhood friend, Mrs. Jelphs, is the housekeeper. There, Alice can have her baby, and give it up for adoption, without bothering anyone—or so her mother thinks. Installed at Fiercombe for the duration of an unusually hot summer, Alice grows increasingly curious about the former residents of the house, especially Elizabeth, the beautiful one-time Lady Stanton, and her last pregnancy. What happened to Elizabeth, her daughter, Isabel, and the child she carried, and why was Stanton House, the monstrous modern mansion built to replace Fiercombe, torn down after standing only 10 years? Why does Tom Stanton, the current heir to the estate, feel responsible for his brother’s death 20 years before, and will his guilt affect his budding romance with Alice? “The real ghosts are the ones that take up residence in your mind,” Tom says, which means that everyone at Fiercombe is haunted by something. The stern Mrs. Jelphs can’t keep her secrets forever, though, and little by little, Alice uncovers the fate of Elizabeth and her daughter, a fate that Alice worries she and her own child may share. Despite reaching toward tales like Rebecca and the novels of Sarah Waters, Riordan offers a leaden version of an old story burdened by awkward flashbacks, flat characters, exposition-heavy dialogue, and a drawn-out, uninspired mystery at its heart.
For true gothic thrills and chills, look elsewhere.
7) "The Cavendon Women" by Barbara Taylor Bradford
Second installment of Bradford’s answer to Downton Abbey.
Most of the major Downton characters, both downstairs and upstairs, have their counterparts in Bradford’s saga of the Inghams, who are striving to maintain their stately home after World War I, when, as Downton viewers know, the British government imposed punishing taxes on the aristocracy. Charles Ingham, the sixth Earl of Mowbray, has not lost the family fortune to foolish investments, but he has married his true love, Charlotte, matriarch of the Swann family, which has served the Inghams for more than 300 years. Most of the family greets the news with sanguinity, including the Earl’s heir, Miles, and his four daughters, whose given names all start with D, a move which is intended to charm but mostly confuses. Even Lady Gwendolyn, the book’s crusty clone of the dowager countess of Grantham, approves the match—although the Swanns are commoners, they are not just any commoners. Only Aunt Lavinia complains and is ostracized by the family until, many pages later, the tragic reason for her snark attack is discovered. There are other token attempts to introduce excitement. One of the D daughters is being slandered at work over a long-ago lesbian entanglement (a problem soon mooted by her respectable betrothal), and the Earl’s ex-wife, Felicity, has absconded with the family jewels. Cecily Swann, a successful fashion entrepreneur in the vein of Bradford’s Emma Harte series, has resumed her affair with Miles even though his estranged wife, Clarissa, won’t divorce him—her obesity has removed her from the remarriage market. However, as if Bradford had no real desire to deal with unpleasantness and would prefer to wax rhapsodic about her favorite subjects—décor, money, and beautiful people—every possibility of interesting conflict is quickly dispatched. The family fortune is only briefly threatened. A desultory murder mystery involving peripheral characters and another of the D’s comes too late to leaven the dullness.
A novel that could have used more melodrama or even drama.
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