Beck, at Le Jardin-Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. 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. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. 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. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. 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. In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. With errors of speech and geography, Erickson delivers a rattling, frothy narrative of questionable historical accuracy.
Cat ends up duped, deserted and dead from childbearing. After Henry’s death, Cat marries Tom, though rumors swirl of his involvement with teenage royal heiress Elizabeth. By the time Cat becomes his wife, Henry is fat, with rotting legs and little remaining virility, while she, despite her principles, has a lover, Thomas Seymour. Although married twice before becoming queen, she and Henry enjoy a flirtatious relationship dating back to her teenage years, when he was in his prime-“his figure magnificent even from the rear.” Their paths cross repeatedly while he works his way through two other Catherines, a pair of Annes and a Jane in search of a robust male heir. After a prophetic dream, she becomes “the lady who saved the North for the crown” by exposing religious fraud and seemingly invoking a miracle. At age 16, she rejects the elderly suitor arranged for her in favor of his grandson.
Parr, born of royal blood herself, is blessed with extraordinarily modern insights, freedom of thought and initiative. 6, Catherine (Cat) Parr, the reader snatches glimpses of all five predecessors in a story that filters out the complicated and dull bits of history, leaving only highlights, romance and action. Biographer and historical-novelist Erickson ( The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette, 2005, etc.) tackles the latest in her sequence of female royals.Įrickson, who specializes in the lives of long-deceased European royalty, turns to the familiar lives of Henry VIII’s six wives.
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