A novel whose entertaining parts don't make for a satisfying whole.
With the Nazi threat as backdrop, a series of family tragedies, criminal violence, and antisemitic acts animate this New England–set prequel to Miller's debut, Norwegian by Night (2012).
A year after small-town Jewish boy Sheldon Horowitz's mother and aunt were killed in a theater fire, his father is killed when a truck runs his vehicle off the road. Twelve-year-old Sheldon, who survives the crash, is convinced it was no accident. Even after moving from rural Massachusetts to Hartford to live with his widowed uncle, he is determined to track down the murderous driver and avenge his father's death. Just how capable this introspective boy is of vengeance (and how shaken he is by the deaths in his family) is revealed when he sets fire to his house to frame as arsonists the Jew-hating siblings who, as salesmen for his father's pelt business, stole from him. At the behest of his best (and only Jewish) friend, Lenny Bernstein, Sheldon escapes to a Jewish resort in upstate New York, where he gets a job as a bellhop and becomes perilously involved in a case of stolen jewels, and Lenny sets his sights on becoming successful as a confrontational stand-up comic. Sheldon's older cousin Abe, obsessed with disproving the weak Jewish stereotype, takes a darker path. After his father, an accountant at the Colt Armory, is set up to take the fall for a bunch of missing guns, Abe exacts revenge on his father's boss. He then escapes to Canada to join the Royal Canadian Air Force with hopes of killing Nazis. There's a lot to enjoy in this sprawling book, which brings a Huck Finn–ish humor to its coming-of-age story. But with its overstated themes and tendency to dictate the characters' thoughts and feelings rather than elicit them, the novel compromises its emotional impact.
A novel whose entertaining parts don't make for a satisfying whole.Pub Date: July 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-358-26960-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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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