While it rings true, the novel’s childlike narration may be off-putting to some readers. Readers who can look past that will...
A child yearning for answers to adult mysteries comes of age in this debut novel about post–World War II Texas.
DeSanders’ unnamed child narrator misses the attention she got from her mother when her father was away at war. He returned home, and two babies promptly arrived; she is displaced from the center of her mother’s life. Her father believes in American institutions, traditional family roles. “Daddy believes in General Motors,” she tells us, and “he wants to have things a certain way.” The author captures the veneer of simplicity that followed the second world war. Capitalism, family, and country reign, but DeSanders’ narrator wants to know why. What is truth? Is it built on trust? The author approaches these questions through the eyes of a child who wants to know everything, from the truth about Santa to how the universe works. “It seems like the main thing grown-ups want is for you not to find out anything about what’s real,” she laments. Unfortunately, her father suffers from PTSD and war injuries; his rage keeps his family on edge. The narrator’s world becomes about trying to anticipate the outbursts of a deeply troubled man while helping her mother maintain the fiction of stability. “I decided then to at least go ahead and like Daddy,” she tells us after he is in a giving mood, “on a trial basis.” As the novel progresses, her view of the world eventually becomes predictably more shaded. “There is a change in the universe…,” she says after an altering experience. “The world is plain and flat now, more gray, the mystery and the brilliance gone out of it.”
While it rings true, the novel’s childlike narration may be off-putting to some readers. Readers who can look past that will find a time capsule of American awakening.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-942658-36-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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