An entertaining historical romance about courageous people.
In Gautreau’s historical novel, a World War II veteran looks back on the war years and the love that he had for a beautiful woman in the French Resistance.
Even though he’s 92, Henry Budge hasn’t slowed down very much. He still takes his beloved dog, Arlequin, for walks along the Boston waterfront, and he regularly goes to the gym. A great adventure awaits, however, as he’s planning on going to Normandy for the 70th anniversary of D-Day. When Henry was injured in France during World War II, he was rescued by members of the French Resistance. A beautiful violin player named Élodie captured his heart as he joined her on a mission to guide Jewish children to England. But now, the elderly Henry has a hard time remembering details about her: “I can never tease out memories of her beyond a half-lidded blur, scumbled images, murky as if seen through a film of cracked varnish.” In Boston, Henry comes across a sexual assault in progress, and although he heroically beats the attacker with his cane, he ends up getting shot himself. New recollections from the war flood his mind, but his severe injury puts his travel plans in jeopardy. However, Henry is undeterred, as his memories of Élodie urge him on. Over the course of this novel, Gautreau shows Henry to be an amiable and worthy protagonist for a wartime story—one that’s awash in historical detail but always leans toward romance. Throughout the narrative, the old man’s voice is at once passionate and annoyed by generic platitudes, and Gautreau consistently manages to make the story’s transitions across decades seamless. The author effectively describes the horrors of war and the many French villages with sharp clarity, and the luminous prose succeeds in making the love story at the center of the narrative strong enough to withstand the chaos.
An entertaining historical romance about courageous people.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-943075-61-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Blank Slate Press
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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
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