Simons’ compassion, sincerity and subtle style impress.
Simons (The Pure, 2012) tells the World War II story of a young German-Jewish émigré in England.
In 1930s Berlin, Jewish surgeon Otto Klein and his family—wife Inga, eldest child Heinrich, toddler Hedi and middle child Rosa—are increasingly aware of the anti-Jewish sentiment sweeping the country and are subject to the government’s restrictive laws. But Otto refuses to believe this is a lasting threat. Even when police official and family friend Wilhelm Krützfeld tries to warn the family they’re on a list to be targeted, Otto refuses his help. Subsequently, on Kristallnacht, Otto and Heinrich are rounded up and detained in a concentration camp. Inga and the girls escape, although Rosa barely avoids capture when she flees from a former family employee. After Otto and Heinrich are freed (thanks to Krützfeld’s help), Otto knows he needs to find a means to get his family out of Germany. After trying to obtain visas at various embassies, to no avail, Otto and Inga seize the opportunity to secure a seat on a Kindertransport train to England for one of the children. The parents choose 15-year-old Rosa, who bears the responsibility of finding safe passage so the rest of the family can join her. Once in England, Rosa is sponsored by Otto’s ultrareligious cousin Gerald and his wife, Mimi, who treats Rosa like a servant. Unlike his parents, 18-year-old Samuel is more sympathetic and tries to help Rosa in her effort to seek employment and visas for her family. After fruitless months of searching, she finally travels to the home of Baron de Rothschild, who agrees to help. What follows are definitive moments in Rosa’s life as she taps into her own strength of character, pursues her dreams, weathers personal losses and endures the inevitable hardships of war. Simons provides excellent details that enhance the credibility of his plot and provide substance to his characters.
Simons’ compassion, sincerity and subtle style impress.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62636-074-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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