A vivid, compelling portrayal of the heartbreaking price exacted for freedom.
A fledgling abolitionist, Mary Willis turns her family’s farm into a stop on the Underground Railroad, but the arrival of Joe Bell endangers everything she holds dear.
Joe is on the run from a plantation in Walnut Grove, West Virginia. His master is a temperate man, letting Joe keep some of the money he earns doing expert work at other people's sawmills, and gentle with Joe’s younger sister, Alaura. But Joshua Bell’s son, Yates, is a hotheaded, jealous, dissipated man eager to take control of his father’s estate. Desperate for money, Yates attacks Joe, stealing the money he had saved to buy Alaura’s freedom. Joe flees, moving along the stations of the Underground Railroad, until a harrowing encounter with a bounty hunter leaves him with a vicious dog bite and a mortal enemy: Karl Wilhelm. He ends up in Mary’s barn, starving and broken. The dog bite forces the local doctor, a sympathetic Quaker, to amputate his leg, and Joe must stay with the Willises as he recuperates, distraught over Alaura’s fate and doubting that he’ll ever make it to Canada. Meanwhile, Yates has sold off Alaura. Leander, Mary’s brother, is sent to Buffalo to advance their father’s lumber business, but he falls into the clutches of Isabel, a wealthy widow, who turns his head, corrupts his morals, and drives him headlong into opium addiction. His return home for financial help tragically coincides with Mary’s plan to secrete Joe to the next station and Wilhelm’s arrival with a marshal ready to arrest Joe and his accomplices. Shots are fired, tragedy strikes, and fates are irrevocably altered. Wang’s debut novel ricochets powerfully from blood-soaked barns to battlefields, from domestic tribulations to political espionage. As war erupts, Wang carefully sketches a series of sacrifices and betrayals, leading Mary and Joe to love and Leander to seek redemption.
A vivid, compelling portrayal of the heartbreaking price exacted for freedom.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12235-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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