A new perspective on an old war. Gripping, thoughtful, heartbreaking, and, above all, human.
Members of a wealthy British family with German roots meet with prejudice and hardship as World War I cuts its terrible swath through Europe.
In Williams’ (Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte, 2014, etc.) epic novel, the first of a planned trilogy, the de Witt family is living patriarch Rudolf’s dream of British aristocracy: country estate, numerous servants, educated sons, and a daughter betrothed to a nearby lord. Despite his successful meat business, however, Rudolf is very much an outsider, having been born in Germany, and as the country declares war in 1914, British citizens of German descent are treated as spies and enemies. Rudolf is imprisoned, and his wife, Verena, struggles to maintain normalcy on the estate as servants, rations, and money disappear. Their children respond to wartime in different ways: selfish Arthur remains in Paris; sensitive Michael joins the army with Tom, one of the servants; Emmeline elopes with a dissenter; and Celia, the youngest, finds herself trapped in the empty estate with her depressed mother until she runs away and becomes an ambulance driver in France. Of course, the horrors of the war change each of them irreparably. The novel is quietly impressive. Early on, it echoes of classic novels (Atonement, Brideshead Revisited), and the story seems almost too familiar, but as the narrative develops and the characters deepen, it’s hard to put down. Celia is the center of the narrative, and her developing self-awareness as she evolves from pampered young debutante to war volunteer forces the reader to imagine not only the family torn apart, not only the country splintered, but the individual souls, young and old, male and female, traumatized by “the war to end all wars.”
A new perspective on an old war. Gripping, thoughtful, heartbreaking, and, above all, human.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-867-2
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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