A sweet tale of love in wartime.
In this novel, a directionless woman finds a relative and an identity in her grandmother’s World War II story.
Georgina Smytheson is living a glamorous life in Manhattan in 2016 when her mother asks her to visit her grandmother Eve in England. Georgina decides to leave immediately. Shortly after she arrives, her grandmother remarks that Georgina has her grandfather’s eyes, which inspires Eve to tell a story. In 1943, Eve’s family owned a glove shop in Worcester. Eve intended to train as a nurse, but because she was fluent in French, she was recruited by the Royal Air Force for a special mission as an undercover agent in France. She used her skills as a glovemaker to send packages with messages to London during the war. In 2016, Georgina unearths such a package, which contains a single pink glove that triggers important memories about Eve’s wartime experiences. As Eve’s recollections unfold, she tells Georgina about Luc Gaspard, a young man she met while working undercover in France (“His deep blue eyes reminded her of the sea on a summer’s day”). Eve and Luc had an affair, and he is Georgina’s grandfather. Although Eve believes he died in the war, she isn’t certain, and Georgina attempts to track him down. She ultimately discovers more than she ever thought possible. Williams’ engaging story bounces back and forth between past and present, showing Eve’s life during the war and in 2016, when she tells Georgina secrets she’s never revealed to anyone. For Georgina, the disclosures lead to new clues about her own past and identity. Eve’s tale explains why Georgina’s mother, Angela, is so difficult. The war story turns out to be a lot more intriguing than the contemporary tale; Georgina has led a charmed life, and readers will find it a bit difficult to sympathize with her. In contrast, Eve’s story is sad, full of danger, and speaks to the horrors of war even for those not fighting on the front. The novel’s ending is a little convenient but very poignant. Still, the book almost feels truncated; readers may find themselves wanting more drama at the end.
A sweet tale of love in wartime.Pub Date: April 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63988-352-3
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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