Readable, sometimes-insightful fiction about the conflict between duty and religion.
Blanton’s (A God Who Believes in Me, 2014, etc.) historical novel follows a German Protestant man from his student days to his command of a Nazi U-boat.
Luther Weitgucker, a boy from a middle-class Lutheran family, is raised in Dresden, Germany, during the interwar years. Although he’s not devoutly religious, he’s firmly rooted in his Christian upbringing and deeply inspired by the Beatitudes. An ambitious young man, he’s also heavily involved in academics and sports. He goes away to college in Bonn where, after a few youthful adventures with women and alcohol, he buckles down and receives a medical degree. Although Luther is opposed to Nazism on ethical and religious grounds, his primary focus is his own future, so he does his best to ignore the growing fascist movement. But when his private medical practice proves insufficient to support his wife and three young sons in the economic and political climate of the late 1930s, he joins the German navy, the Kriegsmarine, and becomes a U-boat officer. The sections that focus on Luther’s personal life ably render the details of his experiences and development, but they often awkwardly toss in historical context using simplistic expository passages. Likewise, Luther’s positive interactions with various token characters, including a disabled neighbor, a Jewish friend, a gay friend, and a Roma lover, display a lack of nuance. However, Blanton does a stronger job of showing how even “good Germans” who weren’t pro-Nazi still contributed to Nazism with their complacency. For example, Luther and his young bride move into their first home as a married couple after their fathers purchase the house cheaply from fleeing Jewish neighbors. At another point, Luther finds himself saying to his wife: “Maybe the Nazis won’t be as bad as we first feared.” As the war progresses, however, Luther’s official duties and growing personal faith—influenced by the contemporary dissident and Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer—increasingly come into conflict. It is this personal spiritual journey, more than the portrayal of history, that will connect with readers, making this ultimately a novel about personal faith.
Readable, sometimes-insightful fiction about the conflict between duty and religion.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5320-0561-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2017
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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