An assiduously researched, cleareyed depiction of genocide.
In Pajalić’s novel, the lead enters adolescence during the Serbian ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia.
After the influx of refugees from the ongoing genocide, Dževahira Torlak, who goes by Seka, lives in besieged Srebrenica with her parents, grandparents, older brother, her mother’s sister and sister-in-law, as well as an uncle and two young cousins. Her family has taken in two refugees, Edina Muharemović and her son, Ramo, who is Seka’s age. As the family works to survive continual bombing, snipers, disease, and hunger, Seka and Ramo grow close and begin a romance as the years go by. In imitation of Anne Frank, Seka, who’s Muslim, writes in a diary to her friend, Zora, a Serb who evacuated with her family before the war. Seka’s writing eventually brings her into contact with a journalist from Australia, where Zora now lives. Alyssa, the journalist, enlists Seka to write an exposé of the corruption in Srebrenica, which stems from closer to home than Seka first realizes. While the novel doesn’t require foreknowledge of the Bosnian genocide, Pajalić doesn’t provide much scaffolding; readers may want to research as they read. In an introduction, Pajalić provides trigger warnings, an index, and a glossary, all helpful tools for this harrowing story. According to the author, the “novel blends factual history with fictional storytelling to explore themes of justice, trauma, and complicity.” She gathered information for the novel from interviews she conducted with survivors of the genocide. Essays based on these interviews are collected in another of Pajalić’s books, Fragments of History: The Essays Behind the Stories. The novel, a thriller, deploys the drama and tension of the genre, though the action falls a bit flat during one character’s sudden villainous turn. Devastating descriptions of the gory consequences of war are the standout scenes here. Still, Seka experiences moments of beauty and joy, all lushly described: “I lost myself in the music, the anonymity of the darkness around us, the heaving bodies, and closed my eyes as I moved.” The novel skewers the international community’s complicity in genocide, which continues today.
An assiduously researched, cleareyed depiction of genocide.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781922871534
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Pishukin Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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