Another crowd-pleasing, if somewhat wooden, tale of steely heroism and stiff-upper-lip bravado from the prolific Higgins. Returning to the WWII settings that he knows so well, Higgins (The President’s Daughter, 1997, etc.) puts a pair of identical twin flyboys, one American, one German, on opposite sides of the war. The story begins in 1997 in Cold Harbour, a lonely Cornish village—and once a secret spy base—where the real Higgins and his real wife Denise find themselves after surviving a crash-landing in the English Channel. There, Zee Aeland, a crusty innkeeper, turns emotional when he glimpses Higgins’s teddy bear Tarquin, which the author purchased in an antique shop. Aeland tells him that Tarquin’s original owner was dashing Jack Kelso, a wealthy, thrill-seeking American vet who fought for the British before the US entered the war. Recovering from a crash- landing of his own in France, Kelso met and married his hospital nurse, the impoverished German baroness Elsa von Halder, who later—after her husband insisted on returning to the States—gave birth to twin sons Max and Harry. Because he was ten minutes older, Max also became the new Baron von Halder. Then, in 1930, Jack died, and took Max to his ancestral homeland, while Harry stayed in Boston with his rich grandfather, brooding, and finally taking Tarquin with him to fight for Finland against invading Russians. By page 60, Harry has joined the RAF (as a Finn!), and Max, a.k.a. “The Black Baron,” is clicking his boots among the Nazis. Using the two boys to show that ineffable daring, chivalric nonchalance, and the ability to execute a flawless Immelmann turn can transcend political borders and ideologies (both Max and Elsa rapidly develop sour opinions about Hitler). Women, spies, tyrants and combat buddies come and go, but teddy bears, brotherly love, and a tearjerker conclusion win out. An old-fashioned, sentimental ode to chivalric virtue and family values: Not as suspenseful as Higgins’s best, but well grounded in historical detail, lightened by amusing encounters with Hitler, Himmler, and other factual fiends. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: May 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14376-9
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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