A powerful and affecting novel of the fight against antisemitism across the ages.
Ross presents a speculative novel with magical elements in which a woman discovers hidden stories of the past, including the horrors that Jewish people endured.
All over the United States, a government-sanctioned group that call themselves the Righteous are violently attacking Americans of Jewish descent and faith. A disturbing number of citizens believe that it’s been proven “once and for all the Holocaust never happened” and that present-day Jewish people are liars and manipulators. Rachel, who’s Jewish, is hidden away by her Christian husband, Henry, for her own safety; this became necessary after someone they thought was a family friend reported Rachel to the government for curating an exhibit of “homosexual nudes” at the art gallery that Henry owns. Meanwhile, Rachel’s son, David, is on the run after getting involved in a bombing plot with members of the Resistance. In the distant past, young Sariah and her family are Christian converts, though they practice their Jewish faith in secret to hide from the Inquisition. After the destruction of her family, she’s hidden away by family friends. Finally, there’s the story of Jakob, a young boy in 1939 who’s trying to survive the horrors of the Holocaust as he sees his friends and family destroyed and murdered one by one. Rachel finds that she’s tied to them all, not just by her heritage, but also by her connection to a cemetery that’s near her hideaway. In a novel with aspects of magical realism, the horrors that Jewish people have suffered sit side-by-side with a timely story of a modern society in which antisemitism is on the rise, resulting in an emotional and compelling tale. The chronological jumps are fairly easy to follow, although the fact that the book starts with Rachel already hidden away and then leaps backward in time only three pages later is somewhat jarring; so is the fact that same chapter switches points of view between multiple characters. However, the author’s style effectively smooths out as the book continues, and the characters and timelines become sharply distinct.
A powerful and affecting novel of the fight against antisemitism across the ages.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781639887422
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
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