A moving rendering of a true story about an art dealer, both thrilling and historically fascinating,
A debut novel details a Jewish family’s escape from the Nazis, and the emotional tumult it suffered in the aftermath.
Sylvie Rosenberg grows up in the Netherlands, the daughter of a wealthy and prominent art dealer. Her father, Benjamin, is able to protect the family under the Nazi occupation because he can procure certain elusive pieces of art the Germans pine to own: “We have connections for the masterpieces that Hitler wants for his collection, which the Germans can only obtain through our survival. Do you understand? Through our survival.” But the Rosenbergs’ predicament becomes increasingly perilous, and Benjamin must come to grip with the fact that he can only protect his family for so long. He eventually strikes a deal with the Nazis to allow his family to leave—25 members of his clan—in exchange for a single Rembrandt. They are permitted to abscond to Spain and then, through France, to a British internment camp in Jamaica. Benjamin is tortured by the beautiful art he sacrifices to his oppressors, as well as by the relatives he proves incapable of saving. Berg, the daughter-in-law of the nonfictional Sylvie, poignantly dramatizes a largely true story. (The book includes an introduction written by the author’s husband, Bruce Berg, Sylvie’s son.) The narrative, mostly told from Sylvie’s perspective, tracks her troubles when she moves to Long Island. With her marriage a disaster, she struggles to accept the absence of her father, and the loss not only of the family business, but also its artistic legacy. She also lives in the shadow of the Shoah, desperately wanting to communicate her Jewish heritage to her son, Michael Beckman, but impotent to do so without burdening him with her pain. The tale quickly leaps from one geographic stage to another, and also from decade to decade and back; this nonlinear approach is sometimes confusing and halting. The subplot following the life of Michael’s wife, Angela, seems digressive and even distracting. Nonetheless, this remains a powerful, haunting story about love, sacrifice, and the rhapsodic draw of beauty, even for monsters.
A moving rendering of a true story about an art dealer, both thrilling and historically fascinating,Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68261-143-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PROFILES
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
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