An intriguing, historically grounded imagining of behind-the scenes machinations during a crucial moment in European history.
Myers’ (Greek Bonds and French Ladies, 2013) historical novel explores Parisian politics on the eve of the Second World War.
Paris in 1937 and 1938 is a precarious place and time in history. The Popular Front, led by the socialist Léon Blum, is constantly under attack by reactionaries and can’t secure a stable hold on the government. Fascists and leftists wage a civil war against each other in France’s southern neighbor, Spain, while the eastern neighbor, Germany, is becoming increasingly aggressive. All of Paris feels as if it’s facing an ideological threat to its existence, but Parisians are divided—primarily along class lines—over whether the threat comes from German Nazism or Russian Bolshevism. Myers articulates these tensions through a rich cast of characters, including the real-life anti-Nazi journalist Geneviève Tabouis; industrial heiress and high-society seductress Countess Marie Hélène de Villars-Brancas; ambitious young politician Jules Dugas; and conniving German diplomat Carl Friedrich von Dinckler. Much of the novel’s plot deals specifically with the lead-up to the Munich Agreement (or the “Munich Betrayal,” as many Central Europeans called it), in which France and Britain chose to appease, rather than challenge, the military advances of Nazi Germany. In Myers’ portrayal of the era, sexual affairs and espionage come into play as the Germans and their allies try to shore up French support for appeasement. It can occasionally be difficult to follow the characters’ comings and goings as they dash around Europe: there are many brief scenes that might have benefited from a bit of expansion, particularly in establishing settings. However, the characters embody the complexity and conflicts of the historical moment. Myers has done his research and impeccably draws the month-to-month social and political situations. The setting also creates a tragic dramatic irony; some of Myers’ characters may believe the Munich Agreement will prevent war and destruction, but readers already know this won’t be the case.
An intriguing, historically grounded imagining of behind-the scenes machinations during a crucial moment in European history.Pub Date: June 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5143-6460-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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