With muted power, this book plumbs the role privilege plays in fate.
A mother’s frantic postwar search for her daughter is the highlight of Landau’s latest.
Landau’s second novel—like her first, The Empire of the Senses (2015)—portrays haut bourgeois European Jews who find their carefully crafted assimilation no defense against barbarism. Having fled the Russian Revolution for Paris, Vera Volosenkovahas achieved success as a novelist. In June 1940, she and husband Max, an opera composer, are ensconced at their villa in the south of France, surrounded by prominent artists and intellectuals, all in denial about the coming German occupation. Landau effectively depicts the psychological disconnect between Vera’s expectations—that civilization could not fail her twice in less than three decades—and the sudden reality of being ordered to “report for internment.” Vera and Max are among the privileged few who manage to escape over the Pyrenees and sail to the United States. Out of necessity, Vera leaves their 4-year-old daughter, Lucie, in France in the care of trusted governess Agnes. Having relocated with many stellar contemporaries to Hollywood, Max finds a comfortable niche as a film composer. Wrongly or not—Max’s inner turmoil is withheld from us in a way that seems manipulative—Vera resents his seeming indifference, particularly after news breaks of a massacre in Oradour-sur-Glane, Lucie’s last known refuge. An alternating thread involves Hollywood screenwriter and aspiring director Sasha, whose origins lie in the shtetls and the Lower East Side. Plotlines converge, like America’s entry into the war, at first too slowly and then breathlessly as Vera returns to chaotic, post-Liberation France on a desperate quest to find Lucie among thousands of missing children. Hollywood’s prewar reluctance to offend Hitler is scantly touched on, and the United States’ embargo on refugees not at all. As the novel progresses, the main conflict is between Vera’s remorse about leaving Lucie and the protective bubble she inhabits.
With muted power, this book plumbs the role privilege plays in fate.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-19053-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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