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
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
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