Years after his Irish vaudeville adventures in Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (2010), 29-year-old Ben McCarthy loses his heart to an eccentrically spunky young matchmaker who keeps him platonically glued to her side as she searches for her missing new husband, an American captain, in war-torn Europe.
McCarthy, who works for a government folklore commission, is collecting material on matchmakers in Ireland when he meets his match in Kate Begley. Their unusually intimate friendship, which requires them to sleep naked together so they know each other (almost) to the fullest, is well-timed. Ben is haunted by the disappearance of his wife Venetia, a mystery that was never solved. Four years into World War II, known as "The Emergency" in Ireland, a pervasive sense of isolation grips the country, a strategically desirable place for Germany and the United States. After Kate's stolid husband, Capt. Miller, resumes his duties in Europe, and then talks her into going behind German lines on a secret mission, she and Ben find themselves in danger. When military authorities tell her the man known as "Killer Miller" was killed, she refuses to believe it and obsessively pursues him across a span of years and across the Atlantic Ocean—still leading Ben around by the heartstrings. Retrospectively told by Ben to his daughters, this book is a teasing epic punctuated by hints of how much worse things are going to get for the heroine. The resolution of Venetia's disappearance feels tossed off, and the novel ends up in John Irving territory with its cute antics involving zoo animals and oddball characters. As a result, it doesn't take flight as much as it should. But with its memorable characters and variety of adventures, Delaney's brand of Irish fabulism is still a delight to read. The novel burnishes this veteran writer's reputation as a consummate storyteller. One of the best fictional wartime couples animates veteran Delaney's darkly wistful novel.
Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6784-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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