A gentle, soft-focus affair that doesn’t entirely avoid queasiness and cliché in its efforts to charm.
A Jewish immigrant goes to extreme lengths to become British in a bittersweet, uneven comic debut.
Handed a book of helpful hints on assimilation as he arrives in England from Berlin in 1937, Jack Rosenblum takes the list of suggestions to heart in this story based on the experience of the author’s grandparents. Jack quickly establishes a successful carpet factory in London, which pays for his oh-so-English expenses: a fine house, a Savile Row suit, a Jaguar car. But money can’t buy him what he craves most deeply, membership to an English golf club—undeclared racism keeps Jews tidily excluded from these. So Jack decides to construct his own golf course, on an idyllic plot of Dorset countryside. Neglecting his business and his sad wife, Jack hurls himself into the task, thereby discovering a different kind of Englishness colored by country characters, landscape, history and myth. Solomons’ prose tips between the awkward and the rhapsodic in a meandering tale in which grave issues such as anti-Semitism, survival and ruin never seem to weigh too heavily. Setbacks mount, but fairy-tale turns of event and acts of loyalty mean the golf course is completed in time for the coronation of Elizabeth II, a crowning moment of achievement and acceptance for Jack Rose-in-Bloom.
A gentle, soft-focus affair that doesn’t entirely avoid queasiness and cliché in its efforts to charm.Pub Date: June 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-07758-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Seven Footer Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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