A novel meditation on the ways we manufacture memory.
Scam artist or Holocaust orphan? Deserving scorn or pity? A beguiling stranger unsettles a New York Jewish family in this haunting tale of the perils of trust . . . and mistrust.
Her manner naïve, her figure Rodin-lush, Polish sculptress Karolina Staszek surprises. Two cousins, against their wills, fall hard for her, and Mekler (Sunrise Shows Late, 1997, etc.) renders both their resistance and rapture convincing. Newly arrived in New York City in 1967, the comely cipher finds Manhattan part love-in, part freak-out. She sympathizes with Vietnam War protesters clubbed in the streets, takes as a lover the married director of the Polish-American Foundation and lands a job as nanny for the darling daughter of staid accountant Noah Landau. Endangering his marriage, he’s smitten with Karolina, who hardly leads him on, but needs him to believe her story. And it’s a stunner. Coming across a newspaper obit for Noah’s Uncle Jake, Karolina becomes intuitively convinced that she’s Jake’s daughter, given up as a child to a Catholic family back in her homeland. Sheltered on their farm from Nazi invaders, she’d grown up clutching rosaries and a reflexive anti-Semitism. Noah’s intrigued; his cousin, Philip, is suspect. For, isn’t it obvious that this shiksa fraud is after their uncle’s will? It’s money, after all, that Philip’s desperate for, to free him from his dead-end law practice. And yet, as her memories begin trickling back—the names of Jake’s dead wife and daughter, telling details, insider clues—even Philip can’t easily discount her. Then, after coaxing her into a trip back to Poland to research her claim, he finds himself strangely but seriously infatuated. As the family mystery is gradually revealed, Philip must contend with the ghosts of his own bigotry, nearly as fierce as the kind Karolina must herself overcome.
A novel meditation on the ways we manufacture memory.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-882593-99-5
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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