A sensitive and engaging portrait of an important time and place.
A novel welcomes readers to the late 1960s, when militant idealism flourished.
It’s the ’60s, and Vietnam War issues are roiling campuses; the Black Panthers are in the news; and a group of college kids, led by Jill Levy and David Levinski, has moved to an old farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. The cohorts will enjoy the simple life, hone their idealism, and plan protests. Fortunately, they have the farm’s wise, older former owners, Leland and Mary Smith, to befriend and ground them. The students squabble at times, and some townspeople are dangerously hostile, but they are surviving, making a go of it. Then Mark, a radicalized and charismatic Vietnam veteran, shows up and convinces Jill and others to bring the war home (think Weather Underground). David, wanting no part of such violence, stays on the farm. He is still there when Jill returns, on the run. The surprises come thick and fast in the dramatic climax. Chodorkoff is a very accomplished writer. The plot is strong, and the characters are well drawn. That said, Jill is also a recognizable type. She’s a daughter of privilege, with her father a well-known liberal lawyer and their Upper East Side apartment a Manhattan salon where they often entertain radicals. David, by contrast, is a middle-class kid lacking Jill’s overweening confidence and self-righteousness. It is all too easy to see how she could come to doubt and even ridicule David’s tentativeness and his ideological unease and how she could be seduced (literally and figuratively) by Mark, who is quick to save his own skin by giving her up to the feds. The author has David narrate most of the engrossing book, but the story is interspersed with Jill’s passages. She largely ruminates on her and David’s relationship and her ideological enthusiasms (and cluelessness). Along the way, readers will learn what year-round life is like in the Northeast Kingdom and the hard work and rewards of maple sugaring. And they will discover at the end that David is a real mensch. But they probably suspected that from the get-go.
A sensitive and engaging portrait of an important time and place. (Short bio, list of books by the publisher.)Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-947917-81-1
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Fomite
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 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 tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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