Valmorbida belongs to a family that emigrated from Italy to Australia after World War II, and the wartime horrors endured by...
One woman’s life serves as an exemplar of the harsh realities experienced by an Italian generation marked by war in this panoramic, yet site-specific, novel.
Maria Vittoria is a bride of advanced age—25—as Valmorbida (The Winding Stick, 2009, etc.) begins her story. In 1923, her father produces a groom for her, Achille, a World War I veteran, and the story of Maria’s life begins to unfold, along with the story of a family and a country devastated by competing loyalties and warring factions. Maria and Achille settle in the plains, in the village of Fosso, but the wisdom imparted to her by the emblematic Madonna of the Mountains, a statue of the Virgin Mary which Maria carries with her throughout her life, harkens back to the rough-hewn lessons and truths of her early life in the mountains of the north. As Maria and Achille nurture both their growing family and a thriving grocery business, the rising power of fascism and the cruel privations of World War II threaten to destroy all the couple has so doggedly worked to create. Valmorbida’s narrative raises issues of misogyny, family loyalty, and moral ambiguity during wartime in an organic way while maintaining the tension and characterization needed to advance a family saga. As the tale approaches a postwar finale, Maria must make peace with past decisions and, once again, depends on her companion since youth, the eponymous Madonna, for guidance.
Valmorbida belongs to a family that emigrated from Italy to Australia after World War II, and the wartime horrors endured by her characters may invite speculation about the autobiographical nature of this work—but the moral and ethical questions raised propel the story beyond the particulars into the universal.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59243-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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