Japan's infamous 1937 asault on the Chinese city of Nanking and its role in the approach of WW II is at the heart of this panoramic and sometimes didactic account of the moral dilemmas confronted by the good in evil times. Chand (The Bonsai Tree, 1983, etc.) is especially adept at setting a scene and creating vivid characters; her attempts at sketching in a historical background, though, are less convincing. Sections on the Meiji dynasty, Emperor Hirohito, and the postwar trials of Japanese leaders are more homiletic than descriptive, needlessly expanding on points her fictional characters make ably on their own. Assembling a group of characters whose backgrounds and past are introduced with flashbacks, Chand brings them all to Nanking in 1937 just before the city is savagely plundered. There is Dr. Martha Clayton, an American missionary, whose husband Bill was killed by Chinese bandits. Martha has lost her faith in God, and clings desperately to her two teenage daughters, Flora and Lily. Helping temporarily at a Nanking hospital is Nadya Komosky, a Russian who fled the communists. At the Japanese Embassy is widower and former leftist Kenjiro Nozaki; in town is Professor Teng, a Chinese political activist whom Kenjiro befriended when both were studying in France; and rounding out this international cast are Donald Addison, a British journalist; Akira, a Japanese soldier; and Tilik Dayal, an Indian freedom fighter. As the Japanese march into Nanking, systematically raping and killing its inhabitants, all will face awful choices. Martha, who refused to send her daughters back to the US, will go mad when Lily is raped and Flora commits suicide; Kanjiro and Tilik will risk their lives to save others; Akira, a military Everyman, will desert, sickened by the killing he's had to do. Only Nadya and Donald will eventually find a measure of happiness. Graphic reminders that words can still paint horrors with harrowing effect in a sometimes schematic but searing story of love and loyalty under fire.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-297-81743-4
Page Count: 461
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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