A quick read that, while not exactly riveting, is thought-provoking.
A naïve Ukrainian teenager joins the German army in World War II in Huzul’s historical novel.
This short novel, composed in the voice of Dmitri Hrechko as a fictional memoir, is a unique coming-of-age story of a 15-year-old boy. In 1939, faced with being conscripted into the hated Soviet Army, Dmitri leaves his family farm, setting out on foot with the clothes on his back, a jug of water, and a loaf of bread across western Ukraine, heading for the neighboring Romania in search of the German army (the Nazis had promised to liberate the Soviet republics). “I had to make a choice,” Hrechko asserts. “Was I willing to continue to live as a ‘prisoner’ of the Soviet regime along with my countrymen or was I willing to stand up for freedom?” Once in Romania, he travels cross-country into Czechoslovakia, trekking alone until he finds a German army unit willing to sign him up. With little understanding of Hitler’s intentions, Dmitri proudly becomes a member of the Wehrmacht. Incredibly, after a military skirmish near the Austrian border, he is promoted to the rank of corporal at barely 16 years of age. The narrative tracks his war experiences in northern Italy and Paris, and through his deployment in March 1941 as a lieutenant commander in the German African campaign. Rather than a vivid tale of battle, the simply composed text is a story of emotional, psychological, and intellectual growth, as Dmitri evolves from an innocent farm boy into a seasoned leader who has witnessed the ravages of war and yet maintains his belief in God, the importance of determining and following his life’s purpose on earth, and the enriching, redemptive power of love and forgiveness. The novel minimizes some of the war’s devastating consequences; this is primarily a poignant, occasionally humorous, story about friendship, love, and new beginnings. It also provides valuable historical perspective to the roiling undercurrents of today’s Ukrainian-Russian war.
A quick read that, while not exactly riveting, is thought-provoking.Pub Date: July 3, 2023
ISBN: 978-1039151642
Page Count: 84
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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