A historical saga chock-full of dramatic events, but lacking in literary merit.
In Austin’s historical novel, the lives of three unrelated families intersect in unexpected ways in World War II–era Vilnius.
Between 1939 and 1944, the city of Vilnius underwent four violent regime changes—it was transferred from Poland to Lithuania, invaded by the Soviet army, occupied by Nazi Germany, and finally swallowed up by the USSR. Paulina Kataski, a devout Polish Catholic, is the cook for the wealthy, aristocratic, and proudly Lithuanian Eimontas family. The Bernstein family is Jewish: Abraham and Sarah run a successful fur business with their son, Daniel; his younger siblings, Jacob and Rachel, are students. The Kataski , Eimontas, and Bernstein families face myriad challenges as the communists and then the Nazis take control, and every family member responds to the mounting crises in their own way. Paulina’s oldest children, Stefan and Valeria, embrace German culture; her husband, Casimir, and son, Pranas, join the communists; and another son, Jan, studies for the priesthood. Baron Eimontas joins the Lithuanian government, risking arrest when the Red Army takes over. His son, Antanas, masterfully manipulates one new mayor after another to maintain his position at city hall. Fleeing to the countryside, Katerina Eimontas reignites an old flame, while her spoiled daughter, Astrid, is brutally attacked. The Bernstein family is divided as Jacob and Rachel become fervent communists—all become victims of Nazi repression. Switching rapidly among the numerous characters, the story moves from one dramatic—sometimes melodramatic—incident to the next. Some key events are unexpected twists, while others too easily predictable. The writing is pedestrian, often relying on expository dialogue (“We should not be ashamed of Lithuanian superiority. Vytautas the Great extended the borders of Lithuania from the Baltic to the Black Sea, making it the largest country in Europe in the fifteenth century,” one character casually mentions at a dinner party). The lurid plot includes rape, suicide, torture, murder, and betrayal. Several characters are described with irritating lookism; for example, Daniel Bernstein is said to be condemned to a life of shame because of a harelip, and Stefan’s wife, Monica, loses his interest by gaining weight.
A historical saga chock-full of dramatic events, but lacking in literary merit.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 311
Publisher: HIPPOCLIDES PRESS LLC
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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