A tense and upsetting but ultimately uplifting historical drama that highlights the horrors of wartime survival.
In Scarlet’s historical novel, set during World War II, a teenage girl in Ukraine struggles to survive as she’s forced to work in a German household while hiding her Jewish identity.
It’s 1941, and 18-year-old Maria Furman is about to take her last final at school when the Nazis descend on her small town of Vinnytsia. After a classmate betrays her, she barely escapes with her life. A kind neighbor forges new papers for her, changing her listed nationality from “Jew” to “Ukrainian,” and christening her with the new name of Anna Ivanovna Furmanova. After she witnesses German soldiers slaughtering her friends and neighbors, she flees; now on her own,Maria quickly loses hope and vows to drown herself in a nearby river,but when she sees another girl named Lyuda attempting to do the same thing, they make a pact to stay alive together. The pair are eventually separated when Lyuda’s deteriorating health forces her into a hospital and Maria finds herself trapped working in a German household. Although she’s hidden her Jewish identity, she’s recognized by a former classmate who has a dangerous preoccupation with her, and could turn her in at any moment. Maria must learn how to fight for herself, and for the house’s other vulnerable girls, if she’s to survive and see Lyuda once again. Scarlet’s sweeping historical saga is loosely based on her grandmother’s own experience during the Second World War. Maria has horrific experiences, including a graphically described rape, other intermittent violence, and witnessing the corpses of murder victims. The prose can feel stilted at times, especially in dialogue (“I do not get headaches. I am a strong Aryan man. I do not get sick like some weakling,” says a German officer at one point). However, the story is so substantive and fast-paced that some readers may overlook such awkward moments. Overall, the author crafted a riveting account of one girl’s struggle to survive in unimaginable conditions.
A tense and upsetting but ultimately uplifting historical drama that highlights the horrors of wartime survival.Pub Date: May 8, 2025
ISBN: 9798992940404
Page Count: 454
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 22, 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
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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