By turns silly and tedious, exploitative and moralistic, the book fails on all fronts.
Anne Frank’s imaginary friend, Kitty, springs magically to life.
In a graphic-novel adaptation of his 2021 animated film, Israeli director/screenwriter Folman has found a new way to monetize the legacy of Anne Frank. The catalyst for the story’s events is—what else?—a burst of lightning, which by striking the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam at precisely the right moment, at precisely the right angle, causes Kitty—the imaginary friend to whom Anne Frank addressed each diary entry—to come to life. In illustrator Guberman’s hands, Kitty is red-haired and willowy, with the bland, wide-eyed expression of a typical Disney heroine—and for that matter, so is Anne, who is immediately stripped of all the qualities that made her so singular in her own life and work. Kitty, who can’t remember what happened to Anne and the rest of the Frank family, is launched on a series of inane adventures around Amsterdam while she tries to finish reading the diary (as she reads, she’s propelled into Anne’s memories). In one frame, Anne and Peter van Daan are listening to the radio. They’ve been growing closer. Meanwhile, Russian forces have broken through Leningrad. In the cel, Anne tips her head coyly toward Peter, her hand to her chin, her eyebrows raised flirtatiously. The caption reads, “One-third of the city’s population have died of starvation.” It’s a moment of bad taste that speaks to Folman’s overarching carelessness. In the end, Folman makes his story into a finger-wagging parable about how, at the same time that it profits from Anne Frank’s legacy, Europe is now failing the many migrants currently seeking refuge there. That Folman should level this charge, given how shamelessly he has exploited that legacy for his own use, is more than offensive—it borders on the obscene.
By turns silly and tedious, exploitative and moralistic, the book fails on all fronts.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781524749347
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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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