A gripping trip through Napoleonic France.
A woman becomes entangled in 19th-century French politics during a search for her mother in this historical novel.
Celeste Bazin was born in a Paris brothel. After her mother sent her to America at age 14, Celeste landed in New Orleans and then San Francisco, where she got rich from the California Gold Rush. In 1857, Celeste, now a young woman, is back in Paris to see her mother, but she hasn’t been able to find her. While hunting for her, Celeste meets an Italian man named Carlo. She needs a place to crash in Montmartre, so Carlo invites her to stay at his boardinghouse. His sister is also living there, helping Celeste feel safer, although Carlo is suspiciously secretive. Odéon, another boarder, helps Celeste track down her notorious Aunt Faucon, her mother’s sister. With only the knowledge of her mother’s last-known whereabouts, Celeste sets off on a journey around France accompanied by Odéon, who has political business in Normandy and agrees to take the protagonist in that direction. During her quest, Celeste stops at an imperial palace, an orphanage, a palatial chateau (where she runs into Carlo again), and a notoriously well-guarded prison. She learns along the way that her mother may have been an operative in the same revolutionary group that Carlo and Odéon belong to and that they are involved in a plot to take down the emperor. Can she find and rescue her mother without putting her own life in danger? Grossenbacher’s descriptive prose helps paint a vivid picture of what France was like in this period under the rule of Emperor Napoleon III. Celeste is a compelling character, one who chafes against restrictions put on women, especially now that she has enough money to live independently. But she can be selfish, pursuing her mother even when nearly everyone she encounters tells her it would be dangerous for both herself and her parent if she persists. Celeste is worldly in some ways but completely naïve in others. Details about the revolutionary plot are revealed in tiny parcels, creating a strong sense of suspense that will keep readers turning pages.
A gripping trip through Napoleonic France.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73584-276-9
Page Count: 308
Publisher: JGKS Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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