During the early 1930s, the U.S. government arranged for grieving “Gold Star Mothers” to visit the French burial sites of their sons killed during World War I. This historical fiction by mystery author Smith (White Shotgun, 2011, etc.) concerns a woman named Cora Blake and her travel companions.
Plucky, no-nonsense Cora is a librarian from Deer Isle, Maine, and a single mother of a son, when she gets the government invitation in 1931. She becomes the member coordinator and organizes the banally diverse group of women assigned to travel together: Jewish Minnie Siebert, who must defy her husband to travel from their farm in Bangor; Irish Catholic Boston housemaid Katie McDonald, who lost two sons in the war; and well-to-do society matriarch Mrs. Bobbie Olsen, who, like Cora, has a secret she’s not telling. The fifth member of the party, Wilhelmina Russell, does not respond to Cora’s letters, but Mrs. Russell does show up to travel on the train from Boston to New York. Only this is Selma Russell, a black seamstress, stereotypically large and comic—discomforting whiffs of race and class snobbery filter throughout the novel. A snafu has mixed up the two Mrs. Russells, and Wilhelmina, a deeply disturbed middle-class housewife recently released from a mental hospital for the journey, has ended up in Harlem. Assigned to chaperone the women, 2nd Lt. Thomas Hammond fixes the mix-up, with the help of nurse Lily Barnett, by resegregating the women before they board the ship for Europe. By the time they reach Europe, Cora and Bobbie have bonded, while romance between Thomas and Lily is palely flickering. In Paris, Cora meets journalist Griffin Reed. Badly wounded and disfigured while covering the war, he sees the possibility of a story in the women’s journey. Throw in Reed’s hedonistic lover and a nasty senior officer who resents Thomas’ privilege, and the trip goes more than slightly awry. While the line-by-line writing is engaging, this take on historic events is made shallow by broad brush strokes and lots of heartstring pulling.
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-95884-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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