An affecting and timely novel of war.
A man races to escape the fall of Srebrenica in Anttola’s war novel.
For three years, Maka Delić has defended the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica from the army of Serbs seeking to overrun it. Now the town has fallen, the other members of Maka’s unit are dead or scattered, and he is forced to tramp through the Bosnian forest with a motley collection of survivors, dodging Serbian military units and death squads sent to kill anyone unlucky enough to remain in the conflict zone. Maka can see that the cause is lost, and he wants nothing more than to escape and reunite with his wife, Amelia, who was pregnant when she was evacuated at the start of the conflict, and meet the son she has been raising on her own. Maka falls in with a number of comrades, including a radical Serbian contrarian, a teacher who knows how to use a hunting rifle, and a goldsmith toting his gold along with him, though the hellish circumstances on the ground mean that Maka is often separated and on his own again. The narrative also follows Amelia, who is living as a refugee in Munich with their son, Dino, aware that Srebrenica has fallen but unsure of her husband’s fate. Through skirmishes and imprisonment, Maka does whatever he can to survive and make it to his family—but his fate may already have been sealed long ago when he decided not to flee Srebrenica with his wife. Anttola, a veteran of the Bosnian war, captures the horrors of the conflict with surreal precision: “He went down to the bodies and started walking among them, turning over some that lay face down. His shadow stirred up clouds of flies, the buzzing convulsing into a wild drone. The faces of the dead were already swollen and discoloured like winter pumpkins...” The claustrophobia of the tiny war zone, and its displaced population with no safe place to retreat, will undoubtedly remind readers of contemporary conflicts. The impact of these scenes of humanity and inhumanity will be felt long after the book ends.
An affecting and timely novel of war.Pub Date: July 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781915603982
Page Count: 320
Publisher: The Book Guild Ltd
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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