A harrowing, tragic story about a disgraceful episode in U.S. history, told from a personal perspective.
A young man who tries to refuse military service in World War II is caught in a nightmare in Waites’ historical novel.
Edward Hohlfeld is a kind, sensitive young man who loves his family and is considering becoming a priest. When he is drafted into the Army, he accepts reluctantly, as he is morally opposed to killing (“He stood his ground, but he never started a fight. But killing? His heart bucked at the thought”). At bootcamp, he asks to be assigned to alternative duties and is refused. Edward’s request makes him unpopular with his sergeant, who later severely beats him for refusing to fire his rifle during training. As he recovers from his attack, unable to remember the details of what happened due to a head injury, Edward is brought before the court and sent to Philadelphia State Hospital as a prisoner of war. The conditions in the hospital are barbaric; Edward, traumatized and deeply depressed, escapes one night, only to be sent back by his horrified parents. While Edward languishes in the hospital, his family splits under the strain, leaving his young sister, Mary, bewildered as to what happened to her favorite brother. When she grows up, Mary becomes determined to uncover the truth and restore Edward’s memory. The narrative is a fictionalized version of a true story—the author is a niece of Mary, Edward’s younger sister. Though the novel is carefully researched, treating the narrative as fiction gives Waites license to fill in the blanks left by recorded history. She envisions Edward as a sensitive, stubborn, righteous man, and constructs plausible scenarios for how he went from bootcamp to a mental institution, a mystery his family never understood. Some of the characters were Edward’s real-life friends and family, others were invented to bolster the story, adding a bit of light to a bleak ending. This is a moving tale of one good-hearted man trapped in the web of a country at war and the family who failed him due to shame and unquestioned reverence for authority.
A harrowing, tragic story about a disgraceful episode in U.S. history, told from a personal perspective.Pub Date: May 29, 2025
ISBN: 9798998969102
Page Count: 340
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2025
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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