Crown offers a waggish tale in which an amiable fox terrier lives out a Forrest Gump adventure.
A whimsical debut novel set during one of history’s ugliest periods.
It’s 1938. Levi, a smart fox terrier, lives in Berlin with professor Carl Liliencron, his wife, Rahel, and their children, Georg and Else. Carl is a renowned expert on plankton, and the Liliencrons occupy a luxurious town house provided by the German National Academy of Sciences. However, the Liliencrons are Jewish, and Hitler’s fanatics are increasingly violent. Carl reacts by lightheartedly changing Levi’s name to Sirius, but then Kristallnacht occurs and the Liliencrons face transport to concentration camps. Rahel has a childhood friend in Hollywood, the actor Peter Lorre, who helps with papers and money to escape. In the U.S.A., the Liliencrons explore Tinseltown, meeting and interacting with movie stars of fame and fortune—Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, etc. As professor Liliencron becomes Crown, the chauffeur, the charismatic Levi/Sirius earns a film contract from Jack Warner, who dubs him Hercules. Anthropomorphism be damned, author Crown succeeds in employing the wiry little canine’s point of view for a good portion of the story. A pop star of the first magnitude, Levi/Sirius/Hercules becomes a Chaplinesque character, but then he loses Warner’s confidence and is banished to the circus. Crown then ramps up the fantasy, with the pup being shanghaied to Germany, where this supposedly devious “Jewish pet" becomes Hansi, Hitler’s favorite companion. The Liliencrons, meanwhile, wax and wane among the stars until they make the decision at war’s end to return to Berlin. World War II was a grotesque human tragedy, but Crown has employed the obscenity of the Holocaust to create a fable about family, the timeless connection between human and dog, and the nature of identity.
Crown offers a waggish tale in which an amiable fox terrier lives out a Forrest Gump adventure.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 9781501144998
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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