Engaging and heartfelt.
A female geneticist makes her way through the scientific world of the mid-20th century.
Even before her first brush with cytogenetics in college, Kate has always known she was different—alienated by her appearance-focused mother and sister; “stifled and out of place” in the small Brooklyn house where she’d grown up. Shaped by the memory of her father, a physician who’d died in World War II when she was a child, Kate has “always been interested in where things came from and how they worked…in what was going on under the rubbery skin of the visible world.” But it’s only when Kate takes an introductory biology course at Cornell that her lifelong preoccupation with genetics begins to blossom. As a research assistant in the school’s greenhouses, Kate is taught to study the inherited characteristics of hybrid plant crosses; while there, she meets mellow-natured John Thatcher, a fellow RA who becomes a collaborator and lifelong friend. As the two progress first through Cornell’s botany Ph.D. program and then the bureaucratic labyrinth of research academia, Kate must learn to carve her way through the male-dominated scientific world—pursuing her own experiments without external support; fending off romantic advances from colleagues; contending with theft of her discoveries. In a career that takes Kate from Cornell to the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor laboratory to, eventually, the Nobel Prize for her discovery of genetic transposition at the apex of her career—showing that DNA sequences can change their positions in a genome, creating or reversing genetic mutations—Kate learns that a life of the mind is not always compatible with romantic relationships or even comprehensible to the people around her, even those she loves most. This novel, whose protagonist is modeled after Barbara McClintock, the first and only woman to win the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine alone, offers a compelling journey through the frustrating, stymied, yet often fascinating world of scientific innovation. Kate is a satisfying character to root for—stubborn, tender, and occasionally myopic—though some supporting characters are underdeveloped or slot into predictable subplots. Still, Pastan’s ability to display the distinctly human side of scientific discovery—its many pitfalls, thrills, and missteps—keeps the novel’s heart alive.
Engaging and heartfelt.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-953002-03-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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 tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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