A sparklingly eccentric novel, historically intelligent and wryly amusing.
In Haas’ historical novel, a German family moves to California in search of peace and freedom as the First World War approaches.
In 1914, Anna Lanz, a violin player, lives in Berlin with her husband Gerhard—he builds telephone switchboards— and two not-quite-teenaged children, Benji and Lilli. War is brewing across Europe, and she lives in a state of emergency, waiting for the world to explode. Gerhard is hopelessly impractical and waits idealistically for communism to deliver them salvation. Anna hears about Sunland, a bohemian community that has retreated into the mountainous countryside of Langenhain, where clothing is optional and electricity is frowned upon. Surprisingly, Gerhard agrees to visit for a couple of days with the family, and they become intoxicated with the simplicity and solace of this place that seems free from global tumult and the crassness of modern life. As Richard Weiss, more or less the leader of Sunland puts it: “Do you know what you do? You have people living in a state of obscene decency. Instead of manufacturing you have singing. Instead of money you have good looks. In place of the army you have conversation under the trees.” In this moving and startlingly fresh novel, the Sunland members—with the Lanz family in tow—decide to decamp for San Bernardino County in California, a land where arable farmland is abundant with the reputation of being the “world capital of being left alone.” However, there is no complete escape from the war—the Sunlanders wrestle with the prejudice and suspicion reserved for enemy aliens, which intensifies as the war begins. Moreover, the sexual libertinism of Sunland is not always emancipating, and threatens the marital bond between Anna and Gerhard. Haas’ writing style is supple and bitingly ironic—there is not a hint of preachy didacticism here, and he vividly captures the wages of world war and the sometimes-quixotic responses to it. This is a mesmerizing novel, delightfully funny and unpretentiously wise.
A sparklingly eccentric novel, historically intelligent and wryly amusing.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798988550549
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Beck & Branch Publishers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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