A historically intriguing and evocative, if slow-moving, family tale.
A slice-of-life novel focuses on an upstate New York factory town during the 1940s.
Readers meet Joanna Ludak in autumn 1940 as she sits in the basement fifth grade classroom of St. Stephen’s, known colloquially as the “Polish School.” Sister Mary Cantabilia, a new teacher at St. Stephen’s, is ruling the class with an iron fist. Soon enough, she turns her wrath on the wistfully imaginative Joanna for an undecipherable transgression. In these first few pages, through Joanna’s musings, readers begin to see the first hint of her still-silent rebellion against the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Over the next few years, she increasingly longs for a life more exciting than what is available in Thompsonville, a typical New York company town. The Thompson Shoe Company’s Eastern European community of immigrants and their first-generation descendants makes up much of the business’s blue-collar workforce. Joanna’s father, Joe, spends his life working for Thompson. He; his wife, Bertha; and Joanna live in the first-floor flat of Bertha’s mother’s house. Joanna’s grandmother Babcia resides in the second-floor flat with her daughter Albina and Albina’s husband. Joanna’s great-aunt Ciotka lives in the attic apartment. Moses’ narrative meanders through the ’40s, during and after World War II, painting a vivid portrait of Thompsonville’s Russian and Polish immigrant population, including the minutiae of family life, religious rituals, traditional foods, and daily hardships and frustrations. The melancholy novel focuses on its captivating characters rather than significant dramatic action. Joe, a good man, is perpetually frozen in place at the shoe factory, emotionally hindered by his difficult childhood in Pennsylvania and his resentment over the dominance of Bertha’s family. Meanwhile, the more proactive Bertha scores a position as an inspector in the newly opened Rand propeller factory, finally escaping the dead-end Thompson work. But Joanna is the central protagonist, and her initially constrained world widens considerably when she attends the town’s best junior high school, filled with students from Thompsonville’s wealthy districts. Here, she begins to find her voice. The author’s prose is graceful and elaborate, albeit hampered by the narrative’s languid pace, which requires considerable patience.
A historically intriguing and evocative, if slow-moving, family tale.Pub Date: June 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-955243-12-4
Page Count: 426
Publisher: DCM Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2022
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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