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
BOOK TO SCREEN
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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