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
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 sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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