A bewitching, often spine-tingling historical novel, clever in its conception and execution alike.
In late 1944, an SS soldier working at a concentration camp faces the chaos of World War II’s final months in Fenstermacher’s historical thriller.
Gottschalk began his military career in the SS with some enthusiasm, eager to please and climb the hierarchical ladder. However, after seven months serving as a blockführer—he’s in charge of a group of concentration camp inmates—he’s becoming dispirited by his work, so much so that he earns the nickname Gloomy Gottschalk. (“Looking in the mirror I had never really noticed any inherent sombreness, but to call my visage radiant or buoyant would be equally inaccurate.”) He’s stunned when he's summoned to the “mansion,” the residence of the camp’s highest ranking officer, Liebehenschell, for reasons that are left ambiguous. When Gottschalk arrives, he is flummoxed by what he finds: Liebehenschell is mysteriously absent, apparently replaced by Katznelson, a man he has never heard of and who seems to lack any semblance of military bearing. The widely feared Robert Mulka, another officer in attendance, shows unabashed contempt for Katznelson, a disgust only further accentuated by Mulka’s drunkenness. Viktor Copesius, the camp physician, presides over this inexplicable meeting, depicted with terrifying clarity by the author. The meeting culminates in a card game designed to determine who will play what role in a game of Wilhelm Tell: In short, someone will be shooting something off someone else’s head. This surreal gathering takes place on the last day of 1944: By this point, it’s clear that the war is all but over and Germany’s cause is lost. The madness that eventually takes hold in the narrative is the product of both the Nazis’ failure and the ensuing chaos—all taking place in a grimly discomfiting concentration camp setting portrayed with unflinching attention to detail by the author. The figure of Gottschalk is the weakest part of this otherwise penetrating novel—blockführers were notorious for both their barbarism and their stupidity, and he defies both these characterizations. Nonetheless, this is an artfully chilling novel, as suspenseful as it is intelligently grotesque.
A bewitching, often spine-tingling historical novel, clever in its conception and execution alike.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 163
Publisher: Origami Press
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
