A historically informative, gritty, and tender coming-of-age immigration saga.
Debut novelist Fischer takes readers to post–World War II Europe, where a young boy and his parents dream of immigrating to America.
Konrad Kemper, the engaging narrator of this tale, was born in Yugoslavia. During the Nazi occupation during the Second World War, Konrad’s father, Hans, was conscripted into the German army and wound up in an American prisoner-of-war camp. At war’s end, Konrad and his mother, Anni, were placed in one of Marshal Tito’s prison camps: “We…had lost our farm in Yugoslavia to Tito’s Communists. They equated German speakers with fascists although we had lived there for two centuries.” Now, Hans has been released and is working on a farm in Austria. Nine-year-old Konrad and his mother make a dangerous escape. In 1948, the family is reunited in Austria at the Straubling refugee camp. The town is flooded with physically and emotionally wounded people from all over Eastern Europe; there are few jobs to be had, and food is scarce. However, the Kempers have a far-reaching goal: One day, they aim to make it to the United States. While their campmates move on to Canada, Australia, and South America, the Kemper family acquires a small shack, working and waiting for American authorities to accept their visa application. Fischer leads readers through the family’s day-to-day struggle in Straubling in a voice that captures the innocence, vulnerability, and enthusiasm of a boy on the edge of leaving childhood. The prose is detailed, conjuring a visceral portrait of the postwar wreckage—the grime and smells of the refugee barracks, the ever present hunger, and people’s hope for something better in the New World. For example, while climbing through the American Army’s garbage dump, Konrad finds treasures—pencils, a spoon, a Classics Illustrated comic book, a batch of unused American Christmas cards. Insatiably curious and observant, he gradually develops an image of a United States filled with wonder, from the extravagance of disposable paper tissues to the miracle of “radios that let you see.”
A historically informative, gritty, and tender coming-of-age immigration saga.Pub Date: July 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72831-684-0
Page Count: 190
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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