A rich and moving saga of bravery both at home and in the face of battle.
The saga of an Australian family set against the high-stakes backdrop of World War II.
In this second installment of Schroller’s Immense Sky Saga, Australian couple Joe and Sophie Parker are freshly back in Sydney, Australia. Their “honeymoon” trip throughout Europe included bringing back Sophie’s aging mother Lily and a young French woman, Marianne, who serves as Lily’s companion and harbors dreams of making a name for herself as a seamstress and fashion designer. Readers meet Joe and Sophie’s boys Jean-Luc and Sam. Jean-Luc runs a winery, and Sam is an experienced pilot. As a love triangle begins developing between Sam, Marianne, and Isobel (another young woman with designs on Sam), the family’s fears about the growing threat of Nazi Germany are soon affirmed when England (a close Australian ally) declares war on Germany after the Nazis invade Poland. While Sam and Jean-Luc are ready and—perhaps only in Sam’s case—excited to fight for freedom from tyranny, Joe and Sophie are haunted by their all-too-recent memories of the horrors of World War I, in which Joe was a commissioned officer and Sophie served as a nurse in Paris. As war envelops the globe, Sophie and Marianne must remain stalwart on the home front, hoping and praying for the chance to someday live out their lives with the men they love intact. Readers of the first novel in this series will be unsurprised to find a deep well of research and authority from which Schroller draws here, along with no small amount of pastoral prose, as seen in Marianne’s letter home describing her first flight with Sam: “I had already spied Sophie and Joe’s house. I could see a tiny figure at the back of the property. It must have been Mrs. Kelly… she always feeds the chickens and gathers eggs before she and her husband Thomas go to mass.” Though World War II novels are commonplace, Schroller has managed to write an affecting tale with memorable characters that stands out from the crowd.
A rich and moving saga of bravery both at home and in the face of battle.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9798985261639
Page Count: 430
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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