Still, this is a mostly well-told tale that sheds light on a sorrowful piece of Holocaust history.
Set in Berlin, New York, and Havana, this ambitious debut novel spans 70-plus years as two girls tell their gripping stories in alternating chapters.
We meet Hannah Rosenthal in 1939 Berlin. A lively 11-year-old, she likes to roam the city with her best friend, Leo. But the Nazis—Leo and Hannah call them the Ogres—are closing in, forcing Jewish families like the Rosenthals to flee. Anna Rosen, also 11, lives in contemporary New York City with her mother, who has become increasingly despondent since the death of her husband, Anna’s father, on 9/11. His life was shrouded in mystery, and Anna is desperate to know more about him. Back in Germany, the Rosenthals set sail on the SS St. Louis, bound for Havana. The (real-life) St. Louis carries 937 passengers, most of them Jewish refugees, whom the Cuban government has promised to take in. But the Cubans renege, allowing only 28 people to come ashore. Those remaining are forced to return to Europe, where many perish. Hannah’s father is among those turned away, but she and her mother, Alma, are allowed to emigrate. Havana, though, never feels like home; Alma, in particular, finds the heat—as well as the political climate—oppressive. Eventually, the Hannah and Anna narratives intersect with both characters getting at least some of what they long for. The parts of the book set in Berlin and aboard the St. Louis are powerful and affecting; the Cuban-born author (who hints the novel is based on his own family history) is particularly good at showing the despair of German Jews like Alma, who considered themselves profoundly German. By contrast, the Cuban scenes seem a little flat and drawn out, and the ending—with Hannah now an old woman—is unexpectedly maudlin.
Still, this is a mostly well-told tale that sheds light on a sorrowful piece of Holocaust history.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2114-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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