A blend of a Dickensian epic and Downton Abbey, with the author arriving at a conclusion that could allow sequels.
Tolkien (Orders from Berlin, 2012, etc.) draws from the World War I–era experiences of his famous grandfather J.R.R. Tolkien to spin a saga worthy of Masterpiece Theater.
When Adam Raine’s mother is accidentally killed during a violent strike in London, his father, a builder and labor activist, moves them both north to Scarsdale, a small coal-mining town, where his cousin got him a job working for the union. The early part of the book takes place in pre–WWI Scarsdale and presents a nuanced portrait of stolid Edwardian England, its class divisions, economic inequalities, and withering aristocracy. Workingmen suffered—"the mine was cruel and the mine was king"—with life belowground chillingly claustrophobic and always dangerous. Adam’s father is killed saving the life of the mine owner, Sir John Scarsdale, during a riot. Grateful, Sir John, sometimes trapped by an aristocracy that restrains his better instincts, becomes Adam’s patron, bringing him to live in the Scarsdale family home and directing his education. The calculating Lady Scarsdale fears Adam will usurp the place of her younger son, Brice. Adam and the devious Brice become rivals for the love of Miriam, the local parson’s daughter, allowing Tolkien further exploration of social mores, but it’s a thoroughly old-fashioned, chaste romance. As Adam and his contemporaries are drawn into the war and shipped off to France, Tolkien displays much empathy for the working class, most vividly rendered in Adam’s friendship with the miners’ sons on the front lines. Characters become the faces of stoic courage or bitter cynicism as an old society is fractured by mechanized murder. Told chronologically through a narrative that marches rather than soars, the story’s second half relates England’s initial jingoistic war fervor, every able-bodied man pressured to join the cause, but then confronts the ugliness a generation decimated by machine guns, massed artillery, and incompetent generals faced returning home to a jaundiced society. The carnage in the trenches of the Somme is depicted by corpses stacked to serve as defensive emplacements and young lives capriciously snuffed out by the snap of a sniper’s bullet.
A blend of a Dickensian epic and Downton Abbey, with the author arriving at a conclusion that could allow sequels.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-54197-8
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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