A suspenseful bridge to the final volume of a historical fiction series.
This second installment of a trilogy focuses on a musician in pre-World War II Germany.
Alejandra Stanford Morrison is a strong-willed woman with ambitions to become a symphony conductor, though it defies the gender expectations of the 1930s. When she learns of her acceptance into a prestigious conservatory in Berlin, her ecstasy is met with reluctance from her husband, Richard, who fears the extended separation between Alejandra and her family (which includes three children). But he eventually voices his support, leaving her in Germany with their Jewish friends Hannah and Ben Adelman. Part One chronicles their travels and musical training amid increasing political tensions in Germany and Austria. Meanwhile, Alejandra faces another kind of turmoil: finding a balance between her professional activities and her domestic life. But most of the drama centers on Alejandra thwarting the romantic advances of a new German friend named Anton Everhardt while trying to halt her own interest in him. After returning to her Minnesota home for a few peaceful years, she travels back to Europe upon learning of the disappearance of Ben and Hannah, and their son, Joseph. After enlisting the help of Anton to locate them, she soon finds her own life in peril as well as Anton’s and Richard’s. In the book’s first half, readers must wade through extensive musical and artistic commentary to follow a plot that overall lacks intensity. Fortunately, the momentum eventually accelerates with the emergence of more serious conflicts, finally leaving readers with a cliffhanger that should entice them to pick up the next volume. Calatayud-Stocks (A Song in My Heart, 2011) portrays her characters clearly, each with a unique voice and agenda, but they require more complexity to avoid becoming predictable and stagnant. In addition, the dialogue is sometimes stilted and too revealing (“I accept your generous gift, and I’m shocked, ecstatic, and bewildered”) and needs to be better supplemented with the characters’ actions and nonverbal cues. But even with these flaws, this novel raises stimulating questions regarding work/life balance and the entwinement of art and politics. And for culture enthusiasts, the author once again offers musical selections corresponding to each chapter.
A suspenseful bridge to the final volume of a historical fiction series.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9987319-3-3
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Calumet Editions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
