In Silverstone’s debut novel, two girls, known in their Ukrainian village for their singing and dancing act, escape to London at the turn of the 20th century.
Aleca Rabinovich and Sarah Brodsky are 16-year-old best friends who, in 1902, depend on the meager coins they collect from their street performance act. When the threat of pogroms begins looming over Ukraine, the two girls are sent by their families—who can only afford one ship ticket each—to London, where the girls must depend on hard work and talent to get by. Their physical beauty helps as well. Aleca and Sarah quickly find housing and work at a tea shop; in numerous erotic scenes, they also find romance, which in turn leads to rivalry and deceit, as the girls decide to venture into different professional spheres. Sarah enters the world of politics, and Aleca becomes “Alison Hayward,” a star of the London stage. From the novel’s first scene, in which a young boy races through London during a 1940 air raid, the novel’s ambition is clear. The quick shift to Ukraine in 1902 confirms that this is to be a grand-scale epic, with major world events serving as the backdrop to generations of private lives across geographical and linguistic borders. The novel’s expansive scope means plenty of energetic interludes, as in the moving episode of Aleca’s return to Ukraine to search for her family. However, the wide scope also means sprawl. The plot veers toward chains of exposition marked by abrupt transitions and unanticipated time shifts. It is also rife with melodrama, some of which is entertaining, some cumbersome. The same can be said of the erotic scenes, which have an impressive, and often comical, array of euphemisms. But when the drama is good, it’s also good fun, particularly in scenes at the theater, and the engaging protagonists are easy to root for.
Unwieldy but enjoyable despite the distracting structure.
Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493654512
Page Count: 388
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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
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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