A moving tale about the irrepressible tide of history and the fates of the individuals subjected to it.
In Rozycki’s historical novel, Jewish brothers in 1939 Poland are forced to abandon their professional ambitions when the Nazis invade.
Brothers Daniel and Ian Ciszek both have big futures planned: Daniel, the older of the pair, is a budding architect and has just written a manifesto that he hopes will change the face of the industry and attract enviable commissions in Warsaw. Ian is headed to Nancy, France, to begin studying engineering. However, these aspirations are waylaid by historical forces bigger than both of them when Hitler’s forces invade Poland, a catastrophe affectingly depicted by the author. In dire need of money and a place to live, Ian joins a group of communist revolutionaries and is drawn into a dangerous plan to hijack a cigarette truck. He falls in love with the beautiful Alicia, but she remains an exasperating enigma to him; even her name, he learns, isn’t real. Meanwhile, en route to see his father Joseph and transport him to safety, Daniel, in short order, finds himself a solider in the Polish Army, captured by the Germans, and sent to a gulag in Siberia. He manages to lift himself out of the “endless line of identical days” by joining a group of engineers building a secret tunnel and also finds love with Nadhya, a literary scholar pushed into exile. Rozycki doesn’t break any new historical or literary ground here—in fact, this is a pastiche of wartime tales with which most readers will be familiar. However, the story doesn’t read as stale because the plight of the brothers is conveyed so poignantly. Ian is the more fascinating of the two protagonists—on the one hand, he was raised to take great pride in his Polish citizenship, and on the other, he is stung by the vicious antisemitism of his fellow countrymen, a predicament that leaves him conflicted about his nation’s fate at the hands of Hitler. This is a dramatically lively novel as well as a historically rigorous one.
A moving tale about the irrepressible tide of history and the fates of the individuals subjected to it.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781592113866
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Addison & Highsmith Publishers
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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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