A disarming narrative about people grappling with the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.
In Wolfe’s debut novel, a GI fresh from World War II attempts to acclimate to college life.
In September 1945, U.S. Army Sgt. Dante Larocca has made it through the war with a Silver Star, extensive shrapnel scars, and a lot of experiences he’d rather forget. “Jagged memories thrummed through his brain: dead guys; blood; butchery; a dismantling fear; images of his former ringmaster, General Patton, swearing at some hapless lieutenant.” He spends his first day of civilian life driving around New York City, slashing the tires of an old rival and sneaking his Weimaraner dog into a movie theater. The revelation that his wife has been cheating on him in his absence, and is now pregnant with her lover’s child, leaves him feeling adrift. Using the GI Bill, he decides to study architecture at the University of Alabama. However, the American South is more alien to the Brooklyn native than the capitals of Europe, and he has no idea what to expect there. It turns out he needn’t have worried, as Tuscaloosa and the surrounding countryside are full of other vets looking to start a new chapter—many of them newly minted students like himself—as well as families still grieving the losses of their sons in combat. Most intriguing is Evelyn Curtis, a daredevil crop-duster pilot who flew with the Women’s Air Force Service Pilots during the war. Dante has two clear goals while in Tuscaloosa: to work with a legendary architect on the University of Alabama faculty and to win a prize that will allow him to study in Rome. Dante soon finds out the war isn’t going away anytime soon—not for him or for the other ex-soldiers—and it still has casualties to claim.
Over the course of this novel, Wolfe shows himself to be a skilled storyteller who clearly knows how to craft a scene and how to imbue even minor characters with personality and dimension. Most affecting are passages in which Dante grapples with his memories of the war, as when he stops to visit the family of a dead friend and gives them a sanitized version of his final moments: “It could have been true,” Dante thinks afterward. “It should have been. Anyway, someone who’s never been there can never understand, so why bother?...Buddy Fooshee had died in some parallel universe, a barbaric world alien to this lovely old farmhouse.” The novel doesn’t quite embrace a sense of realism; Dante and Evelyn are too cool and too charismatic, and they come off more like characters in a movie than real people. This makes for intriguing tension when more authentic-feeling moments of PTSD intrude into the narrative, highlighting the tension between society’s view of the Greatest Generation and how they actually lived their lives. Although this is by no means a flawless work—it’s melodramatic at times, far too long, and the entire text is inexplicably rendered in italics—it is a memorable one.
A disarming narrative about people grappling with the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-60489-314-4
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2022
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
