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ANYTHING BUT YES

A NOVEL OF ANNA DEL MONTE, JEWISH CITIZEN OF ROME, 1749

An intricately detailed novel of resistance and community.

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A Jewish woman fights forced conversion in 18th-century Rome in Davidow’s historical novel.

The author takes inspiration from a diary written by Anna del Monte shortly after her 1749 kidnapping and imagines the interior lives of everyone involved in the community-shaping event. The 18-year-old Anna, a member of one of the prominent families in Rome’s Jewish ghetto, is taken into custody by the Catholic church under a law that allows the church to attempt to convert her by force. As she remains imprisoned for nearly two weeks, subjected to sermons, assaults, and other forms of persuasion, Anna remains secure in both her Judaism and her confidence in her own arguments, but suffers from her treatment and from the agony of never knowing what will happen next or when she might be freed. The story moves between Anna’s cell and the outside world as her relatives mobilize to fight for her freedom, clerics experience mixed feelings about the righteousness of their work, and other Roman Jews try to survive in a system designed to harass them out of their religious beliefs. The author creates rich backstories for the individuals Anna encounters, including a nun who converted from Judaism, a noblewoman who relies on contraceptives obtained from the ghetto, the archbishop in charge of her captivity, and a peasant woman selling buttons on the street. Anna is an engaging protagonist, authentic to her time and circumstances but also comprehensible to the modern reader. While the narrative can feel repetitive at times, with the incessant conversion attempts and repeated references to the del Monte family’s social status, it also brings together the plot’s many threads into a satisfying resolution. The authorial voice tends toward the portentous and melodramatic, but in a way that recalls 18th-century literary style (“For nearly two centuries, the Jews of Rome have been crowded into a pestilential enclosure in the lowest part of the city, their rights gradually but continually diminished, and yet the Church has not converted a tenth of them”), and Davidow’s incorporation of significant historical detail further brings Anna’s world to life.

An intricately detailed novel of resistance and community.

Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023

ISBN: 9781958972083

Page Count: 238

Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing

Review Posted Online: June 5, 2023

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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THE WOMEN

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

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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

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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

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