An intriguing but uneven war tale.
A young woman living in Nazi-occupied Paris gets reluctantly drawn into working for the Resistance in this World War II novel.
Marguerite Charbonneau is a peculiarly apolitical woman—not quite 24 years old, she lives in Paris in 1943 under the German occupation and has little interest in a war she angrily attributes to the stupidity of men. A brilliant student pursuing a research career in quantum mechanics, she considers herself a “purposeful, self-aware narcissist.” She agrees with Sartre that the world is objectively meaningless and the exercise of individual freedom is the only coherent response to an otherwise absurd existence. She even dates German Col. Erich von Hochstätten, a wealthy aristocrat with a wife and kids. But Jean-Baptiste Duval, an old boyfriend, works for the Resistance and convinces her to pass on information she might casually encounter. At first, she defiantly rejects any role in the war, but she stumbles on a plan—Operation Albatross—to lure the Allies into Paris and ambush them, destroying the city in the process. Richards deftly chronicles a predicament that is as emotional as it is political for Marguerite. She is caught between her feelings for Erich, who vigorously opposes the Nazis, and the more dashing Jean-Baptiste, who is as charming as he is exasperating, a confusion she expresses at one point: “How can I be in love with two men so different? Do I have a split personality? Jean-Baptiste is uninhibited (like me), full of mischief, sure of himself to a fault, and a realist. Erich is a realist too, but more cultured, honest, solid, dependable, in control of his emotions, and always thinking of what’s best for me.” The author vividly captures the volatility of Paris under the occupation. But the book sometimes reads like a farcical rendition of what is stereotypically French. The dialogue in particular is a rambling homage to this trope—long-winded, sweeping in scope, and littered with intellectual references, it is more overwrought than gripping. This is unfortunate because there is such a rich body of literature that came out of France during this period that readers should delight in the canon.
An intriguing but uneven war tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9845410-6-5
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Aries Books
Review Posted Online: May 20, 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
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