A hardworking elegy for a city’s devastation.
One Belfast family’s experience of the intense bombing raids of World War II becomes a lens through which to witness the whole city’s trauma and grief.
Philip Bell, a doctor, and his wife, Florence, live a comfortable middle-class existence in the Northern Ireland capital with their two adult daughters, Emma and Audrey, and younger son, Paul. But in the spring of 1941, they, like so many, endured the Belfast Blitz, a sequence of intensely destructive German bombing attacks that included, on one single night, the dropping of 100,000 incendiary devices. Caldwell uses the Bells’ joint and individual perspectives to depict many facets of these events. Audrey, newly engaged to Richard Graham, helps a 6-year-old child reunite with her family. Emma, a First Aid volunteer, survives a close impact but also suffers a terrible loss. Philip is fundamentally shaken by what he witnesses at the hospital. And later, among scenes of tremendous destruction, with uncounted numbers missing and presumed dead, Florence realizes Paul must be evacuated out of the city for his own safety. Around them, Caldwell introduces a lesser population of associated characters, widening the story’s scope to include black market smugglers, children, co-workers, and more. There’s a documentary quality to this broad, fact-driven panorama which lends detail and texture, although it also slows the storytelling. Emma (“kind, stubborn, awkward”), Audrey (“flighty, impulsive, earnest”), and Florence—haunted by a long-lost love—emerge most strongly, their differing perspectives lending emotional depth. The figures around them often seem less fully imagined. Similarly, Caldwell creates some moments of piercing self-knowledge or realization for her characters in contrast with other, more predictable scenes. But overall, her efforts to capture the literally earth-shaking experience of such a violent and terrifying overthrow of normality are effective, affecting, and achieved with sincerity.
A hardworking elegy for a city’s devastation.Pub Date: April 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781638931836
Page Count: 288
Publisher: SJP Lit/Zando
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
