A thrilling tale of shame and redemption.
In Morningstar’s historical novel, a Jewish orphan living in 1930s Berlin hides her religious ancestry while becoming a close friend of high-ranking Nazi Joseph Goebbels’ wife.
In 1913, while still a newborn baby, abandoned Eva Schmidt is taken in by a Jewish orphanage in Frankfurt, Germany, where she is named and raised by Bertha Pappenheim, her “spiritual mother.” In 1931, eager to assert her independence, Eva moves to Berlin and finds work as a shopgirl and as a fortune teller in a dive bar. She is desperate to start a new life but remains burdened by the past she painstakingly conceals—especially her Jewish ancestry during a time of extraordinary antisemitism. Amazingly, she befriends Magda, the wife of the infamous Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and becomes both a beloved friend of hers and a fixture within the perverse cosmos of Hitler’s inner circle. Her American boyfriend, Colonel Thad Cartwright, is a military attache gathering intelligence—the more infatuated she becomes with him, the more he presses her for inside information about Goebbels and his crew. Complicating her life even further, Eva catches the eye of Hans Lorenz, senior counsel to Goebbels, an ambitious man looking to climb up the Nazi hierarchy. In this enthralling novel, Eva is an utterly fascinating protagonist—she wants a full escape from her past, but she is also ashamed of her betrayal of her Jewish ancestry, a bind from which there appears no escape. (“Despite my lies, my past would not go away. It was asymptotic. No matter how much I slashed it, halved it and beat it down, it would never reach zero.”) The plot is brimming with suspense—it is terrifying to witness Eva pushed “into the hands of demons,” a Jew hiding in plain sight among her predators. Morningstar shifts the narrative voice often—both Eva and Hans take turns telling the story—and the approach results in a richly detailed perspective on Germany’s psychological dysfunction at the time. This is a deeply intelligent novel, and a dramatically gripping one as well.
A thrilling tale of shame and redemption.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781624295218
Page Count: 406
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2025
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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