Rich in period detail, swift-paced prose and deserved political outrage.
Harrowing yet inspiring, this historical novel explores a shameful secret—the internment, during World War I, of 30,000 American women suspected of having venereal diseases.
Hardworking 18-year-old Frieda Mintz keeps an eye out for fun—she’s mad about Hazards of Helen flicks at the Bijou Dream, the latest dance craze (the Chaplin wiggle) and boys. With so winning a heroine, Lowenthal (Avoidance, 2002) deftly personalizes a tragic story. Earning eight dollars a week working the Ladies Undergarment counter at Boston’s Jordan Marsh department store, Frieda has fled a fearsome future: marriage, arranged by her punitively kosher mother, to Pinchas Hersch, twice her age and his ears sprouting “curling gray hairs.” Hardly reckless enough to qualify as a flapper or true jazz baby, she’s a “charity girl” of a pack known for haunting dance halls and allowing mildly creepy beaux to pay for their drinks or trinkets. One night, though—bliss! Frieda is swept up by Felix Morse, “a mensch, a U.S. Army private, ready to brave the trenches Over There.” Turns out he’s not only a hunk but an heir, scion of one of Boston’s big-shot politicos. After a magic night in the Morse mansion, however, he leaves Frieda with more than memories—a serious STD. Enter the villainous Mrs. Sprague, of the Committee on Prevention of Social Evils Surrounding Military Camps. Pulling government strings and manufacturing a charge of prostitution, Sprague has Frieda committed to a detention camp in rural Fitchburg. There, alongside plucky hooker Flossie and budding anarchist Yetta, Frieda pitches into Dickensian darkness—rape and then bone-wearying labor. Her eventual deliverance testifies both to her own courage and America’s tardy realization that the save-soldiers-from-fallen-women enterprise was basic criminality.
Rich in period detail, swift-paced prose and deserved political outrage.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2007
ISBN: 0-618-54629-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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