An engaging entry that combines a historical study with an ongoing dramatic saga.
In Cameron’s sequel toBeyond the Ghetto Gates(2020), people of various faiths in 1798 Italy, Egypt, and Israel struggle during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Middle Eastern military campaign.
Mirelle’s life in the town of Ancona is as blessed as it is fraught. Since the French conquered the country in the late 1790s,Jewish people like her were allowed to move out of ghettos, their gates triumphantly dismantled. However, the occupying French impose such prohibitive taxes on her business—which creates ornate Jewish marriage contracts called ketubah—that its survival is in jeopardy. Even worse, her personal reputation has been ruined by scandal, as she abandoned the wealthy David Morpurgo, whom she was intended to marry, and slept with a French soldier—transgressions that even her mother refuses to forgive. Her cousin, Daniel, a lieutenant in the French Army under Napoleon’s command, travels to Egypt. Initially, Daniel is devoted to his leader, but his fidelity wavers as he witnesses the grotesque effects of war and begins to question Napoleon’s dedication to his own troops. Daniel and Mirelle love each other, but Daniel is slow to acknowledge this—a reluctance that Cameron portrays well: “Damn his diffident nature, his fear of losing her forever if he spoke out. She might never know, now, how he felt. Nor would he know if she returned his love.” With admirable intelligence, the author captures the excitement of Mirelle and others around her in response to the rise of Napoleon and the French Revolution, both of which promised the possibility of freedom and the potential establishment of a Jewish homeland in Israel. Part of what makes this historically fascinating novel unusual is the fact that Cameron also presents the perspectives of Egyptians on Napoleon’s campaign, which offers intriguing insight. The author’s prose is clear but unremarkable in style, never moving or hypnotic—however, it remains historically edifying and dramatically compelling.
An engaging entry that combines a historical study with an ongoing dramatic saga.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781647426200
Page Count: 392
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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