A carefully constructed drama about the terrors of the Holocaust, hampered somewhat by shallow characterization.
Debut author McQueen presents a historical novel about a young woman’s childhood and young adulthood in Nazi Germany.
In 1930, Hildegard Applebaum is 12 years old. Her widowed mother, Wilhelmina Appelbaum, is a cabaret performer and occasional sex worker in Berlin. The pair live an exciting but sometimes frightening life that notably lacks stability. Things change in 1931when Hildegard’s mother marries a straitlaced businessman named Otto Richter and the family moves to his farm in the quaint town of Himmelberg. Life there may be a bit slower than it is in Berlin, but the beauty of the Alps can’t be denied. At the local movie theater, Hildegard marvels at films such as director Fritz Lang’s M. However, Hitler’s later rise to power means that films such as The Wizard of Oz are forbidden. It also means a march to war. Hildegard participates in the summer camp-like Jungmädel (“the Young Maidens,” effectively the Hitler Youth for girls), mostly for its sisterlike camaraderie. Around this time, Spanish refugee Miguel Benaroya becomes a helper on Otto’s farm; the young man lost an eye in the Spanish Civil War fighting on the fascist side. As such, it would seem Miguel would fit well into another fascist society, except for the fact that he’s from another country and secretly Jewish. The 28-year-old man and the 21-year-old Hildegard fall in love and try to flee the country together. Then things go very wrong, and Hildegard faces a fate she could not have predicted.
Over the course of the novel, McQueen engagingly highlights the ease with which ordinary people got caught up in the evils of Nazism. Through Hildegard’s perspective, readers see the townspeople of Himmelberg go from ordinary, inoffensive neighbors to “saluting and chanting” acolytes of a new regime. Even new “stainless steel swastika steins” at an inn play a part inushering in a grim new era. Miguel initially thinks he’s safe in Germany; after all, he fought for fascists in Spain, and the townspeople “know me. They ask me to come drink with them.” However, the culture’s commitment to paranoia and intolerance reveal him to be very much mistaken. One drawback to the story is that the portrayals of many of its characters lack nuance; they tend to say exactly what they think and do so in a plain, straightforward way. As one character rather obviously states, regarding the Gestapo, “I hope they don’t come to Himmelberg.” Frequently, statements fail to exhibit much personality or explain what’s happening with a great deal of complexity. Still, the novel does effectively explore different aspects of the Holocaust by highlighting troubling, lesser-known facts (such as that an engineer named Kurt Prüfer designed a four-story crematorium) and showing how many different types of people became victims of the Third Reich. As Hildegard learns all too well, anyone who failed to toe the party line could find their life destroyed in ways that are hard to imagine.
A carefully constructed drama about the terrors of the Holocaust, hampered somewhat by shallow characterization.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9798218163174
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 15, 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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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