Compelling, disturbing, and historically rich.
Rubin presents a family medical drama set against struggles on the battlefield and on the home front during World War I.
It’s May 1917, just one month after the United States officially entered the First World War. As the story opens, Miriam Levine, a 20-something nurse and survivor of polio, is about to wed surgeon Eli Drucker, with whom she works at New York City’s Beth Israel Hospital. Witnessing the joyful event are Miriam’s beloved aunt, obstetrician/gynecologist Hannah Kahn, and her husband, Ben Kahn, chief of the medical staff at Mount Sinai Hospital. Word from the front is that the allied forces are suffering massive casualties. Medical personnel are enlisting, leaving New York hospitals severely understaffed. Over the strenuous objections of their wives, Ben and Eli join the flood of doctors and nurses headed to France—Ben to the American Hospital in Paris, and Eli to field hospitals. Hannah remains home to care for her 14-month-old daughter and her school-aged children, Albert and Anna, even as she contends with budding crises at Mount Sinai. Although Miriam wants to join Eli, the Red Cross rejects her because of her leg brace; however, a twist of fate will present her with an opportunity to serve in France. Part family drama, with an occasional dip into melodrama, and part historical exploration of the medical side of the horrors of trench warfare, Rubin’s narrative maintains a steady pace by alternating first-person narration among the novel’s four uncommon main characters. She focuses not upon the battles themselves, but on their grisly consequences, which left hundreds of thousands of men with life-altering injuries: “Scores of men every waking hour were ambulanced to our hospital, in a flood of screaming, bloody bodies spilling out their insides over their stretchers onto the cobbled streets.” In the stories of Eli and Ben, readers witness dramatic medical innovations as the surgeons and nurses implement new methods for avoiding amputations and develop reconstructive surgeries for head and facial disfigurements. Through accounts of Hannah and her children, Rubin vividly depicts the trauma of war for those on the home front.
Compelling, disturbing, and historically rich.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2025
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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