An affecting, historically astute novel.
A fictional diary chronicles the experience of a young German woman—a Communist and a Jew—fighting fascism in Spain.
When Klara Philipsborn, a German living with her bourgeois family in Berlin, visits Spain in 1925, she experiences a “chemical shift” within herself, falling deeply in love with the place. A budding scientist with an interest in bacteriology, she’s able to secure a position as a lab assistant at the University of Madrid with the help of a referral from Albert Einstein, making her only one of four females out of over 2,000 students. A self-professed Communist with a “Marxist heart,” she becomes deeply involved in the leftist politics of Spain, and when Gen. Franco rises to power, she joins the Fifth Regiment, an “elite army of the people,” to serve as a nurse and translator in the fight against fascism. Meanwhile, Hitler ascends back home in Germany during a time when “logic has been replaced by wishful thinking,” a predicament that threatens her Jewish family, though her father stubbornly refuses to take the danger seriously. Berlowitz structures the entire tale as a series of journal entries composed by Klara replete with personal photographs—this generates an intimacy between the reader and Klara that results in a gripping immersion into the tale. The quotidian details of the entries and the granular accounts of the political scenes in both Spain and Germany, however, often slow the narrative to a crawl. Klara’s experience of alienation is deep and profoundly moving. Unable to return home and live openly as a Jew, she feels compelled to hide her religious identity even from her compatriots in the Fifth Regiment. Her sense of utter outrage seems to sustain her except when it is overcome by episodes of despair and hopelessness, a poignant inner turmoil that, more than political drama, is the core of the novel.
An affecting, historically astute novel.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-375-9
Page Count: 248
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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
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