The sweet remembrances of a time gone by when life was a bit slower and Christmas was not so stressful.
A brief, charming tale of one boy's Christmas.
The book takes place in 1940, before Christmas garnered such modern-day angst, and former poet laureate Hall (The Back Chamber, 2011, etc.) imagines a five-day holiday at his grandparents’ farm at Eagle Pond, N.H. Lush descriptions of his grandmother preparing home-cooked meals on a woodstove, listening to his grandfather recite poetry while milking cows in the frigid barn and making popcorn balls to hang on the church Christmas tree mingle with scenes of family and friends gathered to celebrate the holiday. Far from home and his ill mother, little Donnie thrives in the love and warmth that radiates from his extended family members as they share tales of their own youths or listen to the radio. Although a flush toilet and bathroom are installed next to the dining room, most use the five-hole outhouse when there's company. Hot-water bottles at the end of the bed are a must to drive away the deep cold. The church Christmas pageant is full of hymns, recitations and the reenactment of the birth of Jesus in the stable. These events connect Donnie to his mother and her memories of the same experiences. Christmas morning brings hand-knitted mittens, a scarf and a prized book of poetry. And yet, even in that simpler time, Donnie longs for even older days, when horses and sleighs ruled the snow-covered roads. The time flies by, and all too soon, Donnie must board the train back to his life in Connecticut. But will a Christmas storm make traveling to the train station impossible?
The sweet remembrances of a time gone by when life was a bit slower and Christmas was not so stressful.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-58148-4
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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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