Somewhat overcomplicated but ultimately satisfying. Anastasia Romanov lives yet again!
Anna Anderson’s claim to be Anastasia Romanov—sole survivor of the murder of the czar’s family during the Bolshevik Revolution—is explored in this drama of historical suspense.
In her third novel, Lawhon (Flight of Dreams, 2016, etc.) fictionalizes the story of a woman named Anna Anderson, who was pulled out of a canal in Germany after a 1920 suicide attempt. She claimed to be the surviving daughter of Nicholas and Alexandra Romanov. The czar, his wife, and his five children, along with a few family servants, were famously shot en masse…but this woman claims she escaped. Not only does she resemble Anastasia, but she has the scars on her body that would necessarily be there if she had survived the shooting, and in the course of the 50-year period during which she makes this claim, she wins important supporters, including a childhood friend of the czarevna—as well as many detractors, particularly among the extended Romanov family. Lawhon tells Anna’s story in reverse: from 1970 in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she awaits the results of the final German court ruling on her identity, going backward to 1920, when she was pulled out of the canal. Anastasia’s tale is told in the first person in the opposite direction, starting in 1917 with the Romanovs being taken prisoner in their palace and going forward through their exile in Siberia to the night of the murders. This makes a certain amount of sense, as it allows the story to converge on the moment of truth, when we will find out if Anna is, as she certainly seems to be, Anastasia. What pushes it a little too far from the point of view of readability is the decision to tell individual Anna chapters backward. So, for example, a chapter that covers the period 1928-29 starts in November ’29, then has a section set four months earlier, then six months earlier, then one month earlier, and so forth. Anna’s globe-trotting trials and tribulations are hard enough to follow without this level of intricacy. So the Anastasia story ends up being the more compelling of the two, hurtling as it does to its grisly ending. Then comes an interesting Author’s Note, where Lawhon discusses her process and decisions.
Somewhat overcomplicated but ultimately satisfying. Anastasia Romanov lives yet again!Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-385-54169-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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