A compelling tale that gets lost in a larger, less exciting narrative.
Woodall’s historical novel tells the tragic love story behind a lace wedding dress that was left at a Belgian shop.
In 2010, recent college graduateJuliette DuBois visits her elderly aunt, Isabella Sadler, who’s the owner of the family’s renowned lace business. Facing the end of her career, Isabella tells Juliette the tale of an all-lace wedding dress that had been in her shop for almost a century. In 1910, Delphina Wadsworth, the intelligent and ambitious 18-year-olddaughter of a gentleman farmer, meets University of Oxford law student Edward Jones, the son of her father’s friend. Delphina plans to study at Oxford, as well, and she and Edward begin courting. After they become engaged, her mother insists on commissioning a lace wedding dress from the finest shop in Belgium. When World War I breaks out, Edward leaves to fight, but Delphina has the Belgian lacemakers continue their work, as she wants to make sure that they remain employed. Delphina and Edward correspond for years until the aftermath of the Battle of the Somme, when she believes that he’s been killed in action. Meanwhile, the family of a wounded soldier discovers that a man recovering in a hospital is not their son, and he can’t remember who he is. After lacemaker Marie Sadler delves into the mystery, she’s eventually faced with a choice that could profoundly alter two families forever. Marie’s role in solving the puzzle is the most gripping part of this novel. However, it takes readers a while to get to this part of the narrative; Delphina and Edward’s courtship, and Edward’s letters about the war, are far less compelling, and they border on cliché at times. The prose can also be dry and hackneyed: “In that moment, Edward knew he’d never be the same again.” Still, although World War I has inspired countless works of fiction, the lacemaker story offers readers an unusual angle on the conflict. One wishes that the novel increased Marie’s role, as it might have made the story tighter and more memorable.
A compelling tale that gets lost in a larger, less exciting narrative.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9798871874899
Page Count: 340
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
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 tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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