An affecting novel, deftly crafted.
Two Jewish sisters are separated when they flee their native Austria to avoid the Nazis in Sery’s historical novel.
In 1939, when it becomes clear Vienna is no longer safe for Jews, Jakub and Deborah Stein send their young daughters Elsie and Rose to live in England, each with a different family. When the war finally reaches London, they’re shipped off again to live in the United States—Elsie is adopted by a Jewish family and allowed to maintain her religious identity, but Rose is rechristened Rosalind Cox and raised as a Roman Catholic. The once-close sisters lose touch. Rosalind, a devout Christian as an adult, gets married and bears a son named David Roy; he grows to be an irreligious man and becomes engaged to Ava-May Carmel, a Jewish woman. In an ironic twist of fate, Rosalind rejects their union angrily, her “horrid behavior” an expression of her contempt for Jews: “I knew she disliked ‘others,’” David reflects; “People who weren’t exactly like her: white, Catholic, and married.” (Psychologically damaged by years of trauma, she seems unaware of her own origins.) David is diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder, Gaucher disease, which disproportionately affects Jews of European descent—he is completely unaware of his Jewish heritage, and Elsie, who connects with David via a photograph in an obituary, is the only one who can reveal it. The body of literature engaging with the tragedy of the Holocaust is so vast that it is exceedingly difficult to make an original contribution to it, but this novel feels astonishingly fresh. In this subtly complex tale, David, in addition to Gaucher disease, inherits a legacy of emotional loss and the erasure of familial identity. While the author’s prose is not poetically compelling and flirts with sentimentality (especially at the novel’s conclusion), the plot is delicately intricate and dramatically engrossing. The narrative is admirably thoughtful and raises profound philosophical questions about how one comes to know oneself.
An affecting novel, deftly crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781958105139
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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