Workmanlike and less riveting than the subject matter.
Clayton’s (Beautiful Exiles, 2018, etc.) novel about the Kindertransport program joins the recent spate of Holocaust books (from All the Light We Cannot See to The Tattooist of Auschwitz) that allow readers to identity with heroes and survivors instead of victims.
The real-life heroine here is Truus Wijsmuller, the Dutch Christian woman instrumental in smuggling approximately 10,000 children out of the Reich and into England through the Kindertransport. The villain is the infamous Adolph Eichmann. Early in his career Eichmann authored the influential paper “The Jewish Problem,” about how to rid the Reich of Jews. After Germany took over Austria he landed a powerful position in Vienna. In 1938, Truus met with Eichmann, who offered what he assumed was an impossible deal: If she could arrange papers for exactly 600 healthy children to travel in one week’s time—on the Sabbath, when Jewish law forbids travel—he would allow safe passage. With help from British activists, Truus successfully made the arrangements and found refuge for all 600 children in England. Clayton intersects these historical figures and events with fictional characters trapped in Vienna. Aspiring playwright Stephan, 15 years old when the novel begins in 1936, comes from a wealthy Jewish family, manufacturers of highly prized chocolate candies. The Nazis strip ownership of the chocolate factory from Stephan’s father and hand it to Stephan’s Aryan Uncle Michael. A guilty collaborator torn between greed and love, Michael is the novel’s most realistically portrayed character, neither good nor entirely evil. Sensitive, brilliant, and precocious, Stephan is naturally drawn to equally sensitive, brilliant, and precocious Žofie-Helene, a math genius whose anti-Nazi father died under questionable circumstances and whose journalist mother writes the outspokenly anti-Nazi articles about actual events, like Britain’s limiting Jewish immigration and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, that punctuate the plot. After Kristallnacht Stephan ends up hiding in Vienna’s sewers (a weird nod to Orson Welles in The Third Man), and Žofie-Helene’s mother is arrested. Will Stephan and Žofie-Helene end up among the children Truus saves?
Workmanlike and less riveting than the subject matter.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-294693-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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