A historically astute but dramatically uneven tale.
A Bulgarian teenager, living on the cusp of World War I, seeks revenge after Serbian partisans kill his mother in this historical novel.
During the Balkan wars, Bagatin Petrov served as a spy. Posing as a Greek journalist, he gathered information on the atrocities being committed by the Greeks and Serbs against his fellow Bulgarians as well as Albanians and Turks. Now, he discovers that some Serbian partisans have crossed into Bulgarian territory in search of him, out of an impulse to enact revenge for his espionage but also out of fear that he may still be in possession of incriminating information he has yet to turn over. Accompanied by his brothers, Georgi and Stefan, Bagatin confronts these Serbians and kills them but not before interrogating one of them. The Serbian reveals that they are members of the Black Hand and that the notorious group plans to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Bagatin believes the reckless move will spark a widespread European war certain to engulf a Bulgaria already weary of conflict. He teaches his 13-year-old son, Yavor, how to handle a rifle—for years, in preparation for more danger, he’s been schooling him in the various languages of the region and teaching him military tactics. Bagatin alerts the military about theBlack Hand, but the Petrovs are now in grave danger, and the entire country teeters on the precipice of war. And when Yavor’s mother is murdered and his father disappears, the teen is overcome by a “hatred and a want for revenge” and is plunged into a political tumult soon to swallow the whole continent, a geopolitical unraveling lucidly captured by Lyons.
The author paints an intriguing picture of the Balkans just in advance of the eruption of World War I and skillfully disentangles the complex skein of the region’s internecine animosities. In particular, his knowledge of Bulgarian history and culture is magisterial, and there can be no doubting the rigor of the research he must have conducted. But the work is less impressive as an example of literary fiction. The plot ambles along at a luxuriously leisurely pace, filled with repetitions and redundancies. In addition, the prose is melodramatically overwrought, written with too laborious an ambition for either emotional or philosophical profundity. At one point, Yavor is with his future wife, Kalina: “Yavor sat, not moving, not knowing what to say, he heard a voice, a voice, so loud and thundering, it was so commanding a voice, that it could not be disobeyed, the voice said, ‘LOVE HER AND TAKE CARE OF HER.’ He looked around, surely everyone heard it, but no one seemed to have, everyone sat, just looking at the two of them.” Lyons admirably raises provocative questions regarding the inescapability of war and the grim inheritance of violence and hate from father to son. Still, the author’s worthy intellectual aspirations don’t effectively translate into a satisfying story.
A historically astute but dramatically uneven tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 508
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2020
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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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