A vivid, dramatic, and believable tale of a courageous and self-effacing war hero.
This historical novel features the true story of Gen. René Carmille, “the world’s first ethical hacker,” who saved thousands of French Jews from Hitler’s Final Solution.
Carmille is just one of the many historical figures in this World War II tale. The fictional protagonists are Miriam Meijer, a Dutch Jew, and her eventual lover and husband, Charles Delmand (aka Charles Secœur). Miriam is in Paris when her family perishes during the destruction of Rotterdam. Charles, who is with the Resistance, arranges a new identity—Miriam Dupré—and gets her a job at the Military Recruitment Service in Lyon. Her formidable talents lead to her working directly with Carmille. This is highly classified work—right under the noses of Nazi agents and associates. The question of whom to trust runs through the story like a leitmotif. Everyone knows that the Vichy government is a bad joke that eagerly collaborates with the Nazis. But to round up Jews, the Nazis need to correctly identify them. Carmille has engineered a way to sabotage the IBM punch cards that are used. The hacking and the deliberate stalling are successful. But later, Miriam, having killed a Gestapo officer, is on the run. She and Charles ultimately reunite while Carmille is arrested and tortured by the infamous Klaus Barbie. Harshbarger has a riveting story to relate, and he tells the tale superbly. Miriam—who narrates most of the chapters—is well drawn and braver than she thinks. Charles leads his double life with aplomb. As Delmand, he is a Times of London journalist; as Secœur, he is a French art consultant. How the punch card hacking works, the German occupiers’ arrogance, the daily anxiety that the Jews feel—all of this comes across very convincingly. During moments of heightened drama, the author deftly uses the brevitas trope. At one point, Miriam’s friend Simone has just seen a Jew killed by a German soldier and recounts her reaction: “ ‘Bit my fist till the soldier was out of sight. Then I ran. Through alleys. To the hotel.’ Simone burst into tears. She put her hands over her face. ‘I escaped from Warsaw,’ she sobbed. ‘My family’s there. Trapped.’ ” The useful backmatter bolsters the history and clearly shows that IBM’s complicity with the Third Reich was amoral at best, monstrous at worst.
A vivid, dramatic, and believable tale of a courageous and self-effacing war hero.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64307-276-0
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Mascot Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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