The last Tyneside romance by Dame Catherine Cookson (1906'98). In her final melodrama, Cookson seems to make peace with the class conflict that was the engine of most of her stories. It’s after WWII, and her officers and enlisted joes are evolving into one happy meritocracy, though not without trouble along with way. Upmarket Capt. Matthew Wallingham, 29, is blinded in Italy, after four tough years of service and having earned the respect and loyalty of his men. In the hospital he’s helped through a crisis by Liz ('Ducks') Ducksworth, a nurse he believes is a motherly 49. Actually Liz, a farmer’s daughter, is 24, and the two are reunited when Matthew begins a course in physiotherapy at the same hospital where Liz has taken a job. Matthew lives at the Beavors, near Newcastle, with his extended family: his father, a military man who has late in life developed multiple sclerosis; Peter, another of Cookson’s aristocratic servants whose intelligence and character gain them the status of friend; Matthew’s sad mother, who has a deeply affectionate if unconsummated relationship with Peter; Matthew’s jealous brother, Rodney, whom no one likes very much; and their lovable, crotchety grandmother, 'Granan,' whose powers have not been diminished with age. Add to the mix Jim, the lower-class man who becomes Matthew’s driver, friend, and helpmeet, and a houseful of jolly and well-adjusted family retainers, all of whom assist Matthew and Liz in sorting out their situation and fending off their enemies. Liz is assaulted by an old flame, and hateful Rodney tries to murder his brother. But the family ties the couple have forged'even the one with Flossie the dog'rescue them both. And since this is a romance, Matthew is hit on the head and regains his sight. 'Damned silly thing for me to bring up, class,' says Granan. Despite the sacharrine quality of this farewell, that was the least silly thing Cookson did.
Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-87121-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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