A well-drawn exploration of the untold stories of A Christmas Carol.
A pastiche novel dramatizing the life of the harried clerk from Charles Dickens’ beloved 1843 novella.
Distler’s debut is a lean, surprisingly muscular reimagining of Dickens’ work from the narrative focal point of Bob Cratchit, the clerk in the firm of Scrooge & Marley who defended Ebenezer Scrooge’s outrageous behavior. The author fills in a brief back story, showing Cratchit as hailing from Bristol, England, and seeking his fortune in London. He eventually clerks for Scrooge and Jacob Marley for 15 shillings a week as he begins a family and watches it grow larger and happier. That joy is starkly countered by the atmosphere in the office, where he must deal with his miserly, inhuman masters, both of whom Distler subtly and intelligently brings to life—Scrooge as the colder and more implacably intellectual of the two (only warming for an instant when remembering his late sister) and Marley as the louder, more volatile one. The latter is prone to rages that are intriguingly prompted, in part, by his awareness of his wandering attention and focus. During one of these tirades, he actually strikes Cratchit—and later shortly but earnestly apologizes; Scrooge offers momentary sympathy but then orders him back to work. (Cratchit’s reflexive “Your servant, Mr. Scrooge” is met throughout the book with growled variations on “Yes, yes, you are, and best you don’t forget it!”) Distler indulges in a less-than-successful supernatural plotline that parallels the goings-on in A Christmas Carol. However, her evocation of Victorian London is superb, and her portrayals of Scrooge and Marley simultaneously humanize them and underscore their bitter savagery. Likewise, the story’s most pleasing innovation is in how it adds nuance to Dickens’ fairly one-dimensional version of Cratchit. Distler wonderfully details the clerk’s work tedium, his home life, and even the mundane details of a filthy, bustling London in this intriguing companion to an immortal classic.
A well-drawn exploration of the untold stories of A Christmas Carol.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4849-3235-3
Page Count: 212
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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