Complex, authentic and compelling.
From the bloody aftermath of World War I to the somber streets of London under Nazi attack, this intelligent epic fuses romance, disaster, historical analysis and poetic observation.
Kate Zweig’s husband, a German surgeon, was blinded by a bomb on the eastern front in 1919, and when he died, Kate turned hard—and hardy. Griner (Collectors, 2001, etc.) examines divided loyalties and the exigencies of survival through the eyes of this English-born nurse—bold, beautiful, astute. Loyal to her husband in WWI, she’d witnessed horrors—a priest shot pointblank by marauding Reds; field hospital barbarism (bags of salt sewn into wounds). Then, in 1944 London, a new love arrives—Claus Murphy, American filmmaker of Irish and German descent. His complicated past includes being jailed as a traitor for making a movie about the American Revolution that, revealing real-life British atrocities, threatened the U.K./U.S. alliance. Claus suspects the refugee Kate of pro-Nazi sympathies (she decries the Allied bombing of German civilians) but is soon taken with her subtle and principled politics, courage and air of mysterious sadness. By night, he’s an air warden, pulling bodies from the wreckage of bombed buildings; by day, for the Ministry of Information, he feeds the Nazis lies about D-Day and crafts British propaganda films. The two bond over tales of trauma: his dad, a shopkeeper beaten by anti-Kaiser goons; her vivid remembrance of wartime agony (“the sunken eyes and cyanotic lips of the cholera victims; the lilting bubble of typhus sufferers”). As the two connect, they negotiate the minefields of their histories—histories as messy and moving as those of all combat survivors.
Complex, authentic and compelling.Pub Date: June 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-547-05522-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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