For fans of indomitable heroines and love in the time of conflict, here’s a stirring new addition to the genre.
Sparks fly between unlikely allies—an African American GI and an Italian girl stripped to her essence by suffering—in a World War II romance set in the harshly defended Tuscan mountains.
Eighteen-year-old Vittoria Guidi joins the Italian partisans after she has lost almost everyone—her mother shot by the Nazis; her father deported to Germany; her cousins likely massacred in a nearby village. With family and meaning torn away and her town ransacked by the retreating German army, she has, she thinks, nothing left to lose. But recently, in Lucca, she met Frank Chapel, an American soldier in the Buffaloes—a segregated troop in the U.S. Army—and a connection sprang to life between them. Frank, battle-hardened by the loss of compatriots, the sheer physical toll of routing the Germans, and the steady drip of racial prejudice, will fight his way to Vittoria’s community, and what began as a glance and a feeling will find the space to blossom. At its best, Campbell’s (Rise, 2015, etc.) impassioned, impressionistic prose infuses her lead characters’ feelings and circumstances with an intensity to match the merciless pressures of the era. Exploring a less familiar corner of the battlefield and the conflicting politics of place and time (Vittoria’s mother supported the fascists, as did many Italians; black soldiers were the subject of intense negative propaganda), she delivers striking immediacy. It’s at the periphery, with the secondary characters, that the novel seems weaker—the cartoon Blackshirt, all sneers and “pus-laden” acne; the token Jews; the gluttonous, meaty German general. Even college-boy Frank, smart and handsome, leans toward stereotype, but the love story, though familiar in form, becomes irresistible, especially in its late, poetic, heroic blaze of selflessness.
For fans of indomitable heroines and love in the time of conflict, here’s a stirring new addition to the genre.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4088-5737-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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