The prolific Kennedy (Leaving the World, 2010, etc.), known mainly in the U.K. and France, deserves a wider readership in...
Ex-pat Kennedy’s stateside calling card is a ponderous tale of doomed love set in McCarthy-era Manhattan.
The story begins with Kate, a middle-aged ad woman and divorced single mom whose own mother has just died. At the funeral Kate notices a striking older woman, and begins to get urgent phone calls from a mysterious Sara Smythe. When she agrees to meet Sara she has no idea that this distinguished woman of letters has been following Kate’s entire childhood since her father, Jack Malone, died when Kate was a toddler. The scene shifts to Sara’s POV, beginning in the post–World War II years. Sara and her homosexual brother Eric have fled Hartford, Conn., and their stodgy WASP parents for Gotham, bent on artistic careers. After publishing a well-received short story, Sara nets a prime columnist spot on a weekly magazine. Eric flirts briefly with the Communist party, but after failing as a working-class dramatist, he becomes a lavishly paid writer on a primetime NBC variety show. Sara is almost over her one-night stand with Army sergeant Jack Malone—after they declared undying love, he abruptly cut off communication. When she runs into him in Central Park, the romance rekindles. Eric, however, makes no secret of his disgust for “Brooklyn mick” Jack. When Eric refuses to give up his former Party associates to HUAC, he’s fired, blacklisted and shortly thereafter drinks himself to death. Devastated, Sara is still grateful for Jack’s support until she learns that Jack, himself in fear of losing his PR job, ratted Eric out to the FBI. Back in the present, Kate learns that she has received an unexpected gift, not the least of which is an important lesson in forgiveness. Although an anodyne ending makes for a disappointing anticlimax, this weighty tome is as readable as the '50s bestsellers it channels.
The prolific Kennedy (Leaving the World, 2010, etc.), known mainly in the U.K. and France, deserves a wider readership in his native United States.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9912-1
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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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