A strong, stirring generational tale about a Russian family’s travails.
A second-generation Russian Jew travels to Moscow for a semester abroad in 1980 looking for answers about her family history in this novel.
Anna, a college student, knows very little family lore. She was told that her great-grandmother Zlata was raped and killed during the Russian Revolution. Later, Anna’s grandparents, who met and married in America, willingly returned to Russia with their little girls—Anna’s mother and her younger sister—then fled back to the United States. The book’s narration alternates among time periods: the protagonist in the 1980s; her great-grandmother and Zlata’s daughter, Sarah, in 1917; and Anna’s grandparents’ sojourn in Russia in the early 20th century. Sometime after Zlata’s death, Sarah reluctantly went to America at her uncle’s behest (her father had gone there years before and started a new family). Sarah married Leon Vitsky, they had two daughters, and during the Depression that shook their faith in capitalism, off they went to Russia. In the present, Anna falls in love with young Iosif Belonsky, whose great-uncle Victor, by an uncanny coincidence, was a longtime friend of Leon’s. It was Victor who urged Leon to return to Russia and do his part in building the new and glorious Communist state. During her semester in Moscow, Anna discovers details about her family that will change her life. The book’s dedication suggests that the novel is close to Bordetsky-Williams’ family history. She is an experienced writer, and that shows in the craft and the passion behind this story. Especially moving and painful is the faith that Victor, a true believer, places in the new regime. He paints a picture for Leon of a Communist paradise when in fact conditions are worse there than in developing countries. Sarah is appalled, and Leon finally breaks free of Victor’s spell. But Victor believes in the dream even as he faces Stalin’s firing squad. The fatal consequences of idealism have never been clearer. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” has never been demonstrated more tragically. But readers get a vivid picture of ordinary Russians as warmhearted, giving people, making their plight all the more poignant.
A strong, stirring generational tale about a Russian family’s travails.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73284-804-7
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Tailwinds Press Enterprises LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2021
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
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