Australian native Brothers' epic about an Argentine family torn apart by the 1976 military coup is enjoyable as it goes but...
After 19-year-old Graciela Ferrero and her fiance are "disappeared" by Argentina's military junta in the summer of 1976 during a coup, her parents, Osvaldo and Yolanda, devote their lives to finding her—or, failing that, the baby with whom they learn she was pregnant.
To add to the parents' anguish, Osvaldo, a distinguished physician, has been forced to flee to Paris to avoid reprisals for the editorial cartoons he contributed to a local magazine. With their married older daughter, Julieta, living in Miami, safe but distant, the family couldn't be more divided. Plenty of bad news awaits, but Osvaldo and Yolanda's hopes for finding their granddaughter, Ana, refuse to fade even as the years go by. With no knowledge of her origins—or the meaning of the identifying crosses Graciela shrewdly etched behind her ear with a needle—she has been raised by a loving family with its own hidden truths. While in the military, her adoptive father was guilty of atrocities. Brothers, who as a journalist spent time in Latin America, is at her best capturing the pitched atmosphere of Buenos Aires as the coup unfolds. "It's as if something has interfered with the barometer, pressure added to the air we breathe," says Osvaldo, by then accustomed to the "pop-pop of gunshots" in the middle of the night and pots and saucepans rattling as tanks roll through town. As solid as the storytelling is, though, and as much as the events resonate with today's political upheavals, the novel is too controlled and conventional to have the kind of nervy impact it should—or avoid being dwarfed by actual events. It's almost too pleasurable a read.
Australian native Brothers' epic about an Argentine family torn apart by the 1976 military coup is enjoyable as it goes but lacks the creative spark or sense of risk to stand apart.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 9781632860163
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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