Painful, dramatic, and ultimately triumphant.
Botnick’s multigenerational historical novel chronicles the life of a woman born and orphaned in 1942 in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Sarah’s mother dies during childbirth. The women living in her mother’s Auschwitz bunkhouse nurse and tend to the fragile infant (“because in night’s meat locker a baby took up little room and gave off much heat, soon there was a queue of women”), who, miraculously, remains undiscovered by the camp guards. Somehow, she survives the bitter cold and endemic starvation, and as the Allies approach victory, Auschwitz is liberated and the little girl without a name is taken to Birkenau and then to the Displaced Persons camp in Bergen-Belsen. There she remains, a troublemaking loner, until she is adopted in 1948 by Herr and Frau Vogelmann, a German couple from neighboring Celle, Germany. During her time in Bergen-Belsen, she picked up the name Sarah, which in Hebrew means “Princess” (it is a popular name among the young camp survivors); now, she becomes Sarah Vogelmann (which she later changes to Sarah Vogel). She is satisfied: Finally, she has a family, an identity—until she turns 15 and is handed over to Herr Weiss (she rooms in his attic and is forced to study the New Testament and lap up “night’s milk” from Weiss’ stomach). In 1961, when Germany is divided, she runs away to Berlin. It is the beginning of the long journey that, in 1963, brings her and Sasha, her young daughter, to Queens, New York. The traumas and emotional scars she has accumulated along the way remain with her throughout her long life, and, in turn, are reflected in her daughters and granddaughters. First, there is Sasha, born in Germany, a well-behaved child until she uncovers some of Sarah’s lies. As an angry teenager, Sasha becomes pregnant and gives birth to a daughter, Malcah, who Sarah raises as her own after Sasha leaves home. Then there is Ruth, a surprise blessing born toSarah in 1990, when the protagonist is 48 years old. And finally, there is Ruth’s daughter, the whip-smart Moll, born in 2020.
Sarah is a complex and tragic hero, a Holocaust survivor with a hardened outer shell and a fierce determination that keeps her moving forward despite suffering multiple tragedies. She is also damaged, trapped in the lies she has created to fill in the blanks of a family and heritage she never had a chance to know (even her name is a fabrication). Lyrically and meticulously composed, Botnick’s novel plumbs the emotional depths of the Vogel women, from childhood through adulthood. Not a traditional Holocaust story, Botnick’s narrative examines the effects of the detritus left behind by the great atrocity on those who survived as well as their offspring. The novel is rich with early postwar historical detail, spotlighting the lingering virulent antisemitism in both Europe and America. With its 100-year time span, ending in the not-too-distant future, the story revisits a century’s worth of major historical events and then adds a bit of futuristic whimsy, which is entertaining but a bit of a narrative jolt.
Painful, dramatic, and ultimately triumphant.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9798896360001
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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 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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