A touching tale of young love during wartime.
A group of young people grow up in the shadow of World War I in this historical novel.
This seventh book in Cheatham’s Covington Chronicles focuses primarily on four characters: a young woman named Trudy; her first love, Jeremy; her brother, Will; and his friend Lance.In a series of interconnected vignettes, the author explores this quartet’s coming-of-age during a tumultuous time. Trudy and Jeremy are childhood sweethearts “as close as ribbon cane syrup and pancakes,” but distance strains their romance when they both leave their small Mississippi town to attend college. Will’s roommate, Lance, captures Trudy’s heart, and with the Great War looming, a quick, secret wedding ceremony is arranged. Lance and Will head to the front in France, and Jeremy follows as a war correspondent (he can’t enlist, due to a heart murmur). The boys contend with the horrors of the conflict, which they relate in letters home in as much detail as the censors allow. Meanwhile, Trudy contends with her own challenges at home, including an unexpected pregnancy and the ravages of an influenza pandemic. Cheatham’s novel moves along briskly as she chronicles the tough choices that her protagonists face as well as their moments of joy. Real historical events such as the Battle of Belleau Wood are incorporated into the story; Gen. John J. Pershing even makes an appearance, taking Jeremy under his wing and sharing pithy wisdom on life and love: “If you love her, tell her how you feel,” he advises the ambitious reporter. Although the dilemmas faced by Trudy and company are specific to their time in history, the emotions involved are universal, from Trudy’s fear and shame when she discovers her pregnancy to Jeremy’s worry that he’s blown his chance with the woman he loves. Less realistic is the anachronistic behavior of some characters, such as Trudy’s parents’ unfazed reaction to the news of her secret marriage and pregnancy, which hardly seems typical for 1918.
A touching tale of young love during wartime.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Southeast Media Productions
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2026 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.
