While at times predictable and prosaic, the mutually reinforcing narratives ultimately convey debut novelist Scheinmann’s...
An antiphonal narrative covers a physical trek from Siberia to Poland around the time of the Russian Revolution and an emotional journey from grief to love in the early 1990s.
While on an adventurous journey to Ecuador in 1992, Leo Deakin and his Greek lover Eleni have an accident that leaves her dead and him inconsolable. After Eleni’s funeral, Leo makes his way home to England to continue his academic work (he’s writing a dissertation on ants), but he’s crushed by grief and unable to concentrate. His father Frank is uncommunicative and of little therapeutic help; ditto for Charlotte Philips, a saccharine bereavement counselor: “If marzipan could speak it would sound like Mrs. Charlotte Philips.” Leo’s friend Hannah is sympathetic, though she seems at first ill suited to be Leo’s romantic partner. Meanwhile, Leo latches on to Roberto Panconesi, a charismatic physics professor who promises to provide a philosophical framework making sense of the apparent randomness of life. The novel alternates between Leo’s despair and a seemingly unconnected narrative in which Moritz Daniecki recounts the story of his life to his young son Fischel in 1938, a few weeks after Kristallnacht. Moritz’s life has also been one of tragedy and loss. His incipient, innocent love for Lotte was interrupted by his service in World War I; after being captured by the Russians and imprisoned in Siberia, he made his way back to Poland and learned that Lotte was living in Vienna and engaged to be married. The reader must have faith that these deftly juxtaposed stories at some point will intersect—and toward the end of the novel they do, with satisfying resonance.
While at times predictable and prosaic, the mutually reinforcing narratives ultimately convey debut novelist Scheinmann’s message of the redemptive power of love.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-53833-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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