An engrossing saga of love set against a subtly drawn, disturbing depiction of Hitler’s tyranny.
Nazism and the Catholic Church’s requirement of priestly celibacy thwart a star-crossed couple in this sweeping wartime romance.
Taylor’s novel opens in 1936 on the English Channel island of Guernsey, where 16-year-old Kitty Garland-Fry likes the idyllic surroundings but is embarrassed by her bohemian family. (Her father, a famous painter, moves his mistress and illegitimate daughter to live with the family; Kitty’s mother dismisses her objections as “bourgeois and small-minded.”) Lukas von Harnitz, a gorgeous, poetic young German, arrives to visit English relatives, and he and Kitty fall in love, but his determination to become a Catholic priest seems an insuperable obstacle, and he returns to his Berlin seminary. Lukas’ visiting cousin Caspar, a handsome but cold Wehrmacht officer, is smitten with Kitty and invites her back to his Bavarian castle, where she has sex with him—mostly because she can’t have sex with Lukas. Pregnancy ensues, and Kitty reluctantly weds Caspar and endures his creepy affection, terrible lovemaking, and boorish pro-Nazi relatives. (Typical dinner-party repartee: “We’re the superior race now, and like all such races we’re proving ourselves through war and domination, fulfilling our destiny according to the Führer’s vision.”) After she miscarries, Kitty and Lukas reconnect to help Jews persecuted by the Nazi regime and begin a passionate affair after Lukas, disgusted with the Church’s compromises with the Nazis, abandons his priestly vocation. In 1939, Lukas is arrested for espionage and thrown into the Gestapo’s torture chambers, while Kitty flees Germany as World War II breaks out. Sentenced to a Wehrmacht penal battalion, Lukas wanders through war-torn Europe hoping to someday reunite with Kitty, while back in Guernsey, Kitty wonders if the child she’s carrying is Caspar’s or Lukas’.
Taylor’s sprawling narrative is a coming-of-age story with the highest possible stakes, a tense wartime thriller, a study of faith in extremis when churches crumble and prayers go unanswered, and an unusually intimate portrait of life in Germany as Nazism corrupts friendships and families. It’s also a vivid anatomy of a toxic marriage as Kitty and Caspar’s relationship moves from awkward anti-chemistry to an agonizing marital trap. Taylor’s writing conveys her characters’ delicate shades of feeling with clarity and nuance, but she’s just as skillful in depicting their harrowing physical ordeals. Lukas endures shocking torments (“there was a sudden explosion of unimaginable pain, as if a butcher’s cleaver were hacking his entire body apart, bones and all”), and Taylor sketches one of the great literary evocations of childbirth: “Her bones felt hollowed out, bleached and brittle, like those that washed up at the cove with the tide,” she writes of Kitty’s labor. “The pain got even worse, leaving her unable to speak…And, somehow, she did bear it, because there was no choice but to bear it.” Taylor beats the hell out of her flawed and very human characters—and thus makes their responses to some of history’s most desperate circumstances all the more convincing.
An engrossing saga of love set against a subtly drawn, disturbing depiction of Hitler’s tyranny.Pub Date: March 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781916093249
Page Count: 516
Publisher: The Cameo Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2026
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 sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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