A fitting story about resiliency, ingenuity and heroism.
Turner's (The Star Garden, 2007, etc.) historical novel, set principally in the New World between 1729 and 1781, follows the life of a woman who struggles to control her own destiny and then uses her skills to help found a new country.
Resolute Talbot is a young child when she and her two older siblings are captured by pirates and taken from the family home in Jamaica. Patience, her sister, does whatever is necessary to protect her younger sister and herself, and brother August signs on to become a privateer. Surviving inhumane conditions, illness and harsh treatment, Resolute is stripped of her name, sold as a slave in the New World, taken prisoner by Indians and confined in a Catholic orphanage, where she learns to spin and weave. After years of waiting for the right opportunity, she and Patience escape, but Resolute is left to her own devices on the outskirts of Lexington, Mass. There, her dreams of returning to Jamaica, where she believes her mother awaits her return, are supplanted by the practicalities of everyday living. Resolute inherits property, establishes a business, meets carpenter Cullah MacLammond and weathers the effects of two wars: the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. During difficult political conditions and epidemics that shape Resolute’s family’s and friends’ futures, she proves worthy of her name and uses her skills to assist others. Among her brave acts, she rescues a slave, hides contraband for the Sons of Liberty in her home, volunteers for secret missions, provides sustenance to starving soldiers, and sews cloaks and uniforms for the troops. Throughout the narrative, Turner skillfully keeps her main characters in the forefront and reveals historical events through their eyes and actions rather than by means of long, explanatory passages that stall the plot. The novel is lengthy and somewhat repetitious as so many characters are introduced, disappear and then are reunited multiple times, but the author convincingly conveys a pivotal time in American history and provides a rewarding reading experience.
A fitting story about resiliency, ingenuity and heroism.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-03659-9
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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