Despite occasionally heavy-handed symbolism and anachronistic language, a riotous panorama of a society in chaos.
Scott (Cassandra, Lost, 2004, etc.) traces the intersecting paths of a runaway slave, an ex-belle and a Southern cracker in Civil War North Carolina.
The daughter of a former slave-owner whose failing fortunes have taken them to a mining town, Eugenia Spotswood still pines for her old life in Wilmington. Instead of receiving gentleman callers and revering the memory of a dead mother whose grievances against her husband were expressed in too-vigorous combing of her daughter’s “unnaturally” curly hair, Eugenia is condemned to slatternly drudgery, keeping house and treading long hours on “rockers” harvesting gold dust. Her only respite is Tom, sold to the mines after running away from a plantation near Chapel Hill. Purchased by Spotswood, Tom endears himself to Eugenia, and soon even abolitionist tongues are wagging. When impending war bankrupts the mine, Eugenia helps him flee and absconds herself in another direction with Spotswood’s gold so she won’t have to follow Papa on yet another doomed odyssey. Tom finds work and friendship as a turpentiner and later as a Union scout. Meanwhile, Clyde, the dirt-farmer’s son who caught Tom back in Chapel Hill, flees North after his draft-dodging and slap-happy Pa is killed. Clyde likes the Union soldier’s life until he’s waylaid in a barbaric POW camp (Scott excels at descriptions of gore and putrescence) and winds up, naked and frostbitten, at the house of abolitionist Aunt Baker. And who should Clyde meet there but Eugenia, who was robbed of her ill-gotten gold and became a passionate nurse to the wounded runaways and deserters Aunt Baker harbors in her cellar? When gangrene returns despite an amputation, Clyde insists on seeing his mother before undergoing more surgery. Hoping for news of Tom, Eugenia escorts Clyde home. As the war ends, Tom is also headed for Chapel Hill, bereft of everything except a dead friend’s infant daughter.
Despite occasionally heavy-handed symbolism and anachronistic language, a riotous panorama of a society in chaos.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-425-21252-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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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