A clever, finely detailed historical mystery that keeps the reader guessing until the end.
Seifer’s saga shifts between Nazi Germany and the country’s problematic present-day repercussions as a man tries to piece together his past.
Rudy Styne, a reporter for Modern Times Magazine, has always been intrigued by his past, especially because he has a relative who could be his twin. But Rudy’s doppelgänger, Rolf Linzman, is 15 years older than him. This fact takes us to the story of the Maxwells, beginning in the run-up to World War II; there’s Elias—a Jew trying to pass as Christian—his son, Abe, and their servant family, the Linzmans, Gunter and his grandson, Gunter III, aka Guntie. Elias enjoys a successful career designing and building airplanes, but because everyone knows the Maxwells are Jews, they could lose everything. Eventually (and with crushing irony) the Nazi leadership puts the Linzmans in charge of the company, and the Maxwells must flee for their lives. Casting an ominous shadow over these proceedings is the notorious figure of Hermann Göring, Hitler’s right-hand man, head of the Luftwaffe, and a flamboyant, larger-than-life character whose dress uniform had “so many colorful badges that it looked like a concession stand.” Another standout character, besides Abe himself, is his daughter, Rose, a piano prodigy who, at age 6, manages to offend the narcissistic Hitler at a concert. And then, in a loosely connected present-day subplot, there are evil genius computer hackers with names like NTroodr, T-Dan Mulrooney, and Code Breaker Morant. Sorting out the almost doppelgänger likeness between Rudy and Rolf eventually asserts itself as a major plot thread, and it is indeed a clever device. And the book also serves as a detailed historical summary of Hitler’s strategies during World War II. In an endnote, Seifer separates his fictional characters—Rudy, the Maxwells, the Linzmans, for instance—from the many well-known historical ones he includes. In the narrative itself, however, the author blends fact and fiction almost seamlessly. The subplot with the competing hackers is a tad overwhelming, and many readers will find it hard to understand their machinations. But Seifer is clearly having fun juggling so many characters, time periods, and themes, and his creative energy is infectious.
A clever, finely detailed historical mystery that keeps the reader guessing until the end.Pub Date: April 11, 2019
ISBN: 9781093545777
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
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