Well-developed characters bring new life to a familiar and frightening story.
In this historical novel, two extended German families are torn apart by conflicting loyalties during the rise of Nazism.
Claus Diedrich “Diech” Wessel, the youngest of nine children, was born in Ahrensflucht, Germany, a small village by the North Sea. After digging trenches in the military during World War I, he decides to never again participate in another war. When he returns home, he finds work as a carpenter’s apprentice, which he gradually builds into a career. In the fall of 1922, Diech marries Marie Lucia “Mimi” Hornbostel, and the couple moves in with Mimi’s parents on her family’s farm in Westersode. Their son, Karl-Heinz “Heinzie” Wessel, is born in 1923, but the German economy is fragile, and there’s little opportunity for Diech to buy his own land. Mimi has family living in Absecon, New Jersey, and in 1927, the Wessels cross the Atlantic. Despite confronting some early anti-immigrant hostility, they begin creating their own American dream. Back in Germany, members of the extended Wessel family worry about the rise of Adolf Hitler, who becomes chancellor in 1933. Diech’s brother Fish writes to him: “Who are we but ordinary people caught up in a massive shift, like an earthquake….What can we do but ride out the storm and hope for the best?” From here, the novel—a fictionalized version of author Wessel’s own family history—becomes more ominous and relevant as readers watch the gradual indoctrination of the German populace; Heinzie’s cousin and best friend in Germany, for instance, proudly joins the Hitler Youth. After Mimi returns, in 1934, to her home country with Heinzie and his younger brother Louie to care for her recently widowed mother, readers will find it chilling to observe the fully Americanized Heinzie become a young Nazi. Although the historical details of book burnings and Kristallnacht, portrayed here, are well-known, the author’s strength is in his portrayal of ordinary Germans swept into the increasing horror—some actively, others passively—while others are stilled by fear.
Well-developed characters bring new life to a familiar and frightening story.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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