Once it finds its stride, this novel achieves a breathless finish.
A flapper marries into Chicago’s North Side mob shortly before that gang challenges Al Capone’s South Siders for control of Chicago’s rackets.
Vera Abramowitz, young, Jewish and determined to escape her mother, moves into a boardinghouse and gets a job as a typist, as does her friend Evelyn. Although Evelyn’s origins are solidly middle class, Vera had a brush with Chicago-style crime early on: Her mother took over Abramowitz’s kosher meatpacking plant in the Stock Yards after her father was killed by the notorious Black Hand mob. The friends bob their hair, frequent speak-easies and soon attract gangster boyfriends. For a while, Vera is dangerously seeing both handsome gambler Tony, a Capone henchman, and affable, refined Shep Green, a nightclub owner and kingpin of the North Side gang. When Vera becomes pregnant, Tony absconds, and so she persuades Shep to marry her. Shep’s associate Izzy slaps Evelyn around, and when Vera confronts him, he insinuates that he knows about Tony. Aside from the occasional bullet hole in the ceiling of her opulent new home and foulmouthed gangsters interrupting her Women’s Jewish Council meetings, Vera settles comfortably into marriage to the mob, Roaring ’20s–style. Her support system now includes, besides Evelyn, Basha and Dora, two self-professed gun molls who show the greenhorns the ropes. When Vera witnesses the torture of an underling by Shep and his boss, Dion, she almost leaves, but the birth of daughter Hannah and her luxurious surroundings paralyze her resolve. After Dion is bumped off by Capone’s men, hostilities between the two mobs escalate rapidly. The novel gets off to a slow start as Vera hovers on the fringes of Shep’s world; it isn’t until a third of the way in, as Vera’s dilemma deepens, that narrative tension heightens. Clearly, Rosen, a Chicagoan, has done her research to bring this world to life, but the period ambience is disrupted at times by anachronisms like “rethink” and “updated.”
Once it finds its stride, this novel achieves a breathless finish.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-451-41920-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: New American Library
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 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.
