An elegant novel about the ways pain can shape a man’s personality.
In Walsh’s debut novel, a Connecticut man survives the hell of war only to lead a lonely peacetime existence back home.
Joe DaSilva grows up in a small town on the banks of the Connecticut River, the son of a Portuguese waterman. He spends his childhood learning to tie knots from his father, getting into trouble with his best friend Bill Crawley, and pining after his childhood crush, Peggy. The week before high school graduation, Joe proposes to Peggy only to be rejected. The brokenhearted Joe quickly enlists in the Navy—there’s a war coming, after all—despite the reservations of his parents. With Bill in tow, Joe sails for Manila just in time to get attacked by the Japanese military (a wounded Bill is shipped to Australia before the coming Japanese invasion, but Joe stays behind and is captured when the Philippines fall). He somehow survives the Bataan Death March, a prison camp, malaria, and dysentery, but when he makes it back to Connecticut at war’s end, he’s a shell of his former self. Even worse, he learns that Peggy and Bill have become engaged in his absence. Resentful of his closest friends and wracked by post-traumatic stress, Joe settles into a stoic life as a mechanic. For the next 40 years, he’s content to repress his memories of the war—and all of his other grievances—until a new waitress takes a job at one of the local restaurants. Leigh Ann and her young daughter, Shelly, are new in town. Shelly spends her days alone at a vacant hotel while Leigh Ann works her shift, and Joe takes it upon himself to keep an eye on the child. As Joe inserts himself into their lives, he can’t help but allow them into his own. In the process, he’s finally forced to deal with the many ghosts of his past.
The author is a skilled storyteller with a knack for bringing scenes to vivid life, whether they depict a bucolic afternoon spent fishing on the river or a terrifying moment from the war: “He was barely able to rise to one knee the night the Japanese burst into camp. The first rifle butt to the back of his head folded the hemispheres of his brain in on each other. He lay there on his side, time out of body, eyes recording the scene like a camera knocked to the ground, still rolling.” The novel takes its time getting started, and the early chapters are burdened with an unfortunate sentimentality. From the point the war commences, however, Walsh weaves an immersive narrative that does not let up for the rest of the book. Even when the story treads into familiar territory—older Joe is reminiscent of any number of late-career Clint Eastwood film performances as a grump waiting to have his heart softened—the author is deft enough at characterization and plotting to keep the material from feeling stale. Those looking for a bighearted tale of PTSD and catharsis will find much to love in Joe’s story.
An elegant novel about the ways pain can shape a man’s personality.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781977261120
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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