Hill takes time out from his notable series featuring detectives Dalziel and Pascoe for a longish (448 pp.) tale—first published in Britain in 1987, and very much in the mode of his WW I chronicle No Man's Land—of moral and political compromise, despair, and unexpected love in occupied France. The densely plotted story centers on Gunter Mai, a sympathetic lieutenant in the occupying German army who is obliged to canvass Paris for possible collaborators, and on Janine Simonian, a young woman who is obliged to enlist officially as an informant to the Abwehr in exchange for news about her wounded husband Jean-Paul. When JeanPaul returns to his family, partly amnesiac and transfixed by hatred of the Germans, Janine, drawing away from him, becomes gradually more dependent on Mai; and when her mother-in-law and two children are rounded up in a pogrom, she offers herself to Mai again. Even though she has no secrets to betray and he does not want to use her, they make a second bargain, preventing the children (though not their grandmother) from being shipped to Auschwitz. In the meantime, Jean-Paul has become one of the most flamboyant members of the Resistance; and when Janine and Mai make a third bargain (the children have been seized again, this time in Toulouse), her bogus information coincides with a tip having fatal consequences for Jean-Paul and his colleagues. Hill's account of Janine's collaboration is grimly ironic: she never intentionally gives Mai any information; he is unable to restore any of her loved ones and after the liberation reverses political sympathies; she is branded her husband's betrayer by the very citizens who had been collaborating more fully themselves. A moving, richly textured account of an inhuman military occupation and the all-too-human loyalties it spawns. In Hill's view of war, there can only be losers.
Pub Date: July 14, 1989
ISBN: 0586204539
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Countryman
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1989
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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