An engaging historical ghost story.
A couple is haunted by spirits who take them through 20th-century history in Derrick’s novella.
Cluny and his partner, Mike, have retreated from a busy life in Los Angeles to a more suburban setting, and they believe the house across the street is haunted. Cluny and Mike invite the house’s occupants, an older couple named Laurel and Alec, over for dinner and have a perfectly nice time, although the guests start making eyes at each other and then beat a lustful, hasty retreat before dessert is served. While this does not dispel their suspicion that ghosts are involved somehow, Cluny and Mike continue to socialize with them. Laurel comes over one day and tells them a ghost story: As a child, she saw a red-haired man everywhere she went, but no one else could see him. Her search for the man’s identity led her to Prague, roughly around the time of the Prague Spring of 1967, where she met Alec. They believe that the red-haired entity is named Damek, a man who died tragically in the house during the lead-up to World War II. Laurel and Alec speculate about their connections to Damek and his lover, Annelise, connections that remain strong in the present day. Laurel’s story packs a punch, although the present-day narrative doesn’t entirely work as a framing device, as Cluny and Mike are not fleshed-out characters. Some of the prose is a bit purple (“I cannot adequately describe what it means to me to bring resolution to a soul in crisis. It is a calling far transcending theological study….I prayed that whatever I might be lacking would be provided to me. Here, now, I am certain that missing element has arrived, and it is you, Laurel”), but the story pulls the reader along throughout the strange tale of Damek. In a peculiar writerly flourish, the author omits quotation marks, which sometimes makes it tricky to tell what is or isn’t verbatim dialogue. Ultimately, it’s a pleasingly spooky narrative, but it ends a little abruptly and would be stronger without the frame.
An engaging historical ghost story.Pub Date: March 29, 2023
ISBN: 9781632431127
Page Count: 45
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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