by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat ; translated by Adriana Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 26, 2015
Despite occasionally heavy subject matter, it’s a lightweight intellectual exercise.
Lévy-Bertherat’s debut novel is a story about storytelling—both historical and personal.
Hélène arrives in Paris in 1999 to study archaeology. She befriends a group of students, including Guillaume, a whimsical man who adores the work of H.R. Sanders, a beloved author of young-adult adventures. “H.R. Sanders” is actually the pen name of Daniel Roche, Hélène’s great-uncle, in whose Paris apartment she happens to be staying. The plot becomes more tangled when Hélène and Guillaume begin investigating Daniel’s past, including the time before he was adopted into Hélène’s family, when he was a young Jewish man in Paris during the Nazi occupation. In examining her great-uncle’s history, Hélène finds herself rereading his books; she’d never before seen the magic in them, but soon she finds herself devouring them with renewed interest, even as she approaches the kind of adventure found in their pages. The best moments in Lévy-Bertherat’s short novel involve people falling into stories, whether it’s Hélène almost missing her train stop due to an engrossing chapter or characters constructing personal histories for themselves in order to hide—or perhaps to heal—past traumas. But for a novel that focuses on the excitement of storytelling, there's little excitement here. Never does one get the sense that Hélène is in any sort of danger. She simply wanders from location to location, talking to people with ease, without the author ever developing a clear sense of the stakes. The writing is lovely, yes, but the novel suffers from not deciding what it wants to be: it neither excites enough to be great young-adult fiction nor does it dig deeply enough to be a compelling novel of ideas.
Despite occasionally heavy subject matter, it’s a lightweight intellectual exercise.Pub Date: May 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59051-707-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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