The journalistic flatness of the narrative and Carter’s tendency toward easy sentimentality make for a disappointingly...
As the title implies, Carter's latest (The Puzzle King, 2009, etc.) explores the experiences of a group of Jewish refugees from Germany in 1930s New York City while also offering a nod to earlier Irish immigrants.
Carter takes her time establishing protagonist Egon Schneider’s family history and credentials. In 1890, illustrator Elisabeth Arnstein and naturalist Rudolph Schneider, both secular Jews, fall in love, marry, and raise only child Egon. By 1900, the publication of their opus European Ornithology has earned the couple a reputation as “the Audubons of Europe.” After Elisabeth’s death, her sensitive spirit broken by the poverty she witnesses in post–WWI Germany, Egon decides to become a doctor. His college roommate, Meyer Leavitt, an aspiring writer, recognizes the Nazi threat before Egon does, but by the late 1930s both men, along with a number of acquaintances—this story is about survivors, not the victims left behind—have arrived in Manhattan. Meanwhile Carter shifts gears to trace the family history of Catrina Harty, the daughter of Irish immigrants. By her late 20s, Catrina has survived her father’s desertion when she was a child and the deaths of not one but two husbands, one barely explained, the other under suspicious circumstances. The romance of Egon and Catrina, who meet at the grocery deli counter where Egon works since his medical license is useless in America, must weather any number of obstacles, but their interminable goodness and kindness make for rather dull characters. More intriguing are some members of Egon’s circle: a bitter, formerly wealthy banker’s daughter; a couple who are too homesick for Germany to adjust to their new world; and secretly sensitive pessimist Meyer, who writes about his friends with brutal love.
The journalistic flatness of the narrative and Carter’s tendency toward easy sentimentality make for a disappointingly pedestrian take on what should be a dramatically charged subject given today’s refugee crisis.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4555-7143-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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