Because Bakopoulos has meticulously researched the period, Athens effectively becomes a character as real as the family she...
A family’s life and loves play out amidst the political turmoil of the military coup (aka “The Regime of the Colonels”) in Greece in 1967.
Sophie and Nick are a young couple—unmarried and politically committed—when the military takes over Greece in April 1967. Chaos is the order of the day, as protestors are tear-gassed or picked up for interrogation and torture by the police. Sophie lives with Eleni, her widowed mother; Mihalis, a beloved uncle intermittently estranged from his wife; Anna, her younger sister; and Taki, her brother. Eleni is a physician, now called upon to heal those injured in street confrontations, and Mihalis, a poet, is sympathetic to the demonstrators, in part because of his past involvement in the Greek resistance against the Nazis. Eventually, the political situation becomes too volatile for Sophie, so she emigrates to Paris, becoming a student and working on her doctorate on the works of the Greek poet George Seferis (whose 1971 funeral Bakopoulos memorably depicts). Taki is likewise disgusted with the oppressive regime, so he emigrates to the United States, making a home in Michigan. Anna stays in Athens but begins a torrid affair with a married university professor. Although Anna becomes more preoccupied with her personal situation than with the politics of the time, Sophie—who in Paris takes up with Loukas, a cousin of her former boyfriend—follows Greek politics closely and, after six years, returns home, pregnant and ready to begin a new life.
Because Bakopoulos has meticulously researched the period, Athens effectively becomes a character as real as the family she lovingly delineates, and her street scenes disclose the scorching reality of persecution and maltreatment in this sordid time.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3392-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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 tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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