Simple enough to be better aimed as a YA, though not without its historical charm and interest.
Quilting, the Underground Railroad, and the struggles of immigrants in Pennsylvania all find a place in this passable fourth in the Elm Creek Quilts series (The Cross-Country Quilters, 2001, etc.).
With young Sarah as assistant, Sylvia’s ancestral home of Elm Creek Manor has been successfully reinvented as a summer camp for quilters. While she’s lecturing down south, Sylvia is shown a quilt, now in the possession of a southern family, that makes obvious references to Elm Creek Manor and is ominously named the Runaway Quilt. Thus the mystery begins, with Sarah afraid that her ancestors may have been involved in slavery. Conveniently, the clues are housed right in the attic of Elm Creek Manor, where Sylvia finds three quilts and a memoir written by Gerda, the spinster sister of Sylvia’s relative Hans Bergstrom and his wife Anneke, mid–19th-century German immigrants. Comprised mostly of the memoir, the narrative stitches its way from Gerda’s compelling tales of the Bergstrom’s success in the New World to the contemporary mystery of the Runaway Quilt, whose provenance is revealed at the end (though apparent earlier). While Hans and Anneke build roots in their small Pennsylvania town, Hans eventually making a fortune in horse-breeding and Anneke as a skilled seamstress, Gerda becomes involved in the suffragette and abolitionist movements. By chance (Anneke accidentally copies a quilt pattern used as a signal to runaway slaves that they had reached a safehouse), a woman, pregnant and injured, shows up, paving the way for the Bergstrom home to become a stop on the Underground Railway. In spite of opposition—and perhaps treachery—from Anneke, she is given shelter until she delivers a son. The historical voice rings truer than the contemporary one, making the reader long for Gerda’s story, and hers alone.
Simple enough to be better aimed as a YA, though not without its historical charm and interest.Pub Date: April 4, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2226-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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