An evocative novel of the 1960s that hits just the right tone.
The third installment in a series of historical novels covering the last 70 years of American history.
In Bond’s latest volume, the narrative moves into the incredibly turbulent late 1960s, dramatizing a tight progression of well-known social and political events: riots in Paris, the Woodstock music festival, civil rights marches, the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King and Sen. Robert Kennedy, and, looming over everything, the war in Vietnam. The four central characters of the series—Troy Barden, who’s drafted and shipped off to Southeast Asia; Tara O’Brien, a drug-addicted rock star; Daisy Moran, a student of philosophy at Stanford University; and Mick O’Brien, Tara’s brother and a former football hero who comes to protest the seemingly endless Vietnam conflict—work their ways through the signature crises of the time. Troy, for instance, is embroiled in the Tet Offensive as the story opens (“Gasping, screaming, dazed, breathless, heart pounding with fear and danger, Troy tried to see everywhere as he was running, crouching, crawling, rolled on his back to change clips and ran forward, firing again”), while Tara prays for his safety back at home. Mick is rustling up votes for Kennedy, a candidate whom he idolizes, characterizing him as “a mind so fierce and bright it encompassed almost everything.” Bond handles these and all the other plot threads with skill and confidence even if the work as a whole lacks a clear feeling of narrative momentum. In particular, he has an ear for capturing pitch-perfect dialogue that suits the setting: “Hash makes you see clearly,” one character opines. “But the State doesn’t want you to see clearly.” Another character drolly comments on the Paris student riots: “France, you must remember, is a fashionable woman. She likes a fling now and again, something that gets her blood hot for a few weeks.”
An evocative novel of the 1960s that hits just the right tone.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Big City Press
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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