An unusual historical romance set in two time periods.
McCarthy’s historical novel follows a young doctor as she investigates the life of a German soldier and his lost love.
In 2005, Sofia Rossi is an orthopedist working for Doctors Without Borders. During a hiatus, she travels to Italy to care for her Aunt Elena and visit other family members. She also helps Teresa Sartoni of Juliet’s Club in Verona respond to letters addressed to the tragic fictional character from William Shakespeare’s play; the correspondents, mostly “hapless lovers” writing as Romeo, express their wishes in the missives. After the death of her true love, Claude, Sofia finds herself uninterested in romance; however, she becomes fascinated by a story, in one of the letters, of German soldier and chauffeur Lukas Müller, who was forced to join the military during World War II, and a teenager named Anna Bissoli, whom fellow teen Lukas sought to save during the conflict. In this well-plotted novel, McCarthy alternates Lukas’ past and Sofia’s present perspectives over time. The plot remains intriguing as new characters are introduced and family conflicts ensue. With some beautiful descriptions, McCarthy ably portrays how World War II affected the lives of civilians, and families in particular. One fine example is when Lukas waits at the train station: “everywhere, bundles of personal possessions, some in battered suitcases, some in cardboard boxes held together with pieces of string or leather belts. And then there were the beggars, the petty thieves, the homeless and vagabonds, the civilians and former soldiers, who had been maimed during the war: everyone marked by wounds of some kind, physical and mental.” The work also excels at portraying familial dynamics over generations. Although there are moments when Lukas’ portion becomes a bit ambiguous, due to its slow, meandering style, the relationships within it make for an engaging read. Readers will find themselves invested in what happens to the characters.
An unusual historical romance set in two time periods.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781798738375
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2023
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 sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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