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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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