A predictable romance tempers the energy of this tale about the healing powers of love.
Having escaped from a train headed to Auschwitz, Vera and Edith, two young Hungarian women, mourn their parents as well as Edith’s fiance, all likely lost to the Holocaust. Can they forge new lives in the postwar world?
After surviving the war by working on a farm, Vera and Edith realize their hometown of Budapest holds little promise. Fortuitously, a kind American officer sends them to Naples with a letter recommending Vera to the embassy. Once there, Vera, who is fluent in five languages, readily secures a job as secretary to Capt. Anton Wight, an American officer at the embassy. She’s intent upon taking care of Edith, who’s looking for male attention, which she finds with Marcus, a photographer ready to sweep her away dancing and maybe into social ruin. But it’s Vera who falls in love first, with the dashing Capt. Wight, who treats her to dinner dates and gifts. Although Vera tells Anton about her experiences during the war, including her guilt over surviving while her family presumably perished in the gas chambers, her attraction to him quickly outweighs any lingering trauma. However, Anton’s struggles with his own past derail their romance, plunging Vera into more heartache as her path traverses the globe. The romance between Vera and Capt. Wight is, unfortunately, much too easy, beginning with its inevitable whirlwind courtship. Publishing for the first time under her birth name, Abriel (Christmas in Vermont, 2019, etc., written as Anita Hughes) was inspired by her mother's life, and she deftly sketches the postwar world from Naples to Venezuela and Australia, with attention paid to the changed architectural and emotional landscapes. The rubble of bombed cities, the blank map of lost relatives, and the uncertainty of day-to-day survival outline the anguish of the lost generation.
A predictable romance tempers the energy of this tale about the healing powers of love.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2297-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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