An impressive debut novel; hopefully, there’s more.
A boy’s coming-of-age story runs through this debut novel filled with Cold War history (including a cameo by Willy Brandt) about a scary struggle with a villainous family.
In 1960s France, Roy Harrison’s lawyer father, Steve, is serving a stint with the Air Force Reserve in Alsace-Lorraine. They’ve had a difficult relationship since Roy’s mother died a few years ago, and Roy didn’t want to go, but his father insisted. A man of discipline and few words, Steve is trying his best to be a good father, though intimacy doesn’t come easily to him. He enrolls Roy in a lycée, pitching him headfirst into French culture—not a welcoming atmosphere for an American kid. Barely speaking French is the least of Roy’s difficulties. One of his classmates, Robert LePerrier, goes out of his way to bully and abuse him for no discernible reason. Readers will be well into the tale before the back story emerges, detailing the LePerrier family’s sordid activities during WWII and their toxic attitudes that have infected their son. Their story (father Jean-Claude’s specifically) brings in two real-life figures from the past: the notorious Klaus Barbie, “Butcher of Lyon,” and Jean Moulin, hero of the Resistance. Steve confronts the LePerrier patriarch, exposing his dark past and bringing him to trial. Meanwhile, Roy has become fluent in French and has—much to his surprise but not the reader’s—come to love his place in France and his French friends. He has grown up; his father is proud of him—and says so. At times, reactions from characters can be a bit over-the-top, not matching the provocations. Nevertheless, the narrative is nicely bookended by passages set in Paris in 1999, when Roy runs into Robert, his old nemesis. They will never be close, but they understand each other. In the epilogue—later that weekend—Dr. Harrison flies home to the States and to his wife and his kids and his good life.
An impressive debut novel; hopefully, there’s more.Pub Date: May 5, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-595-67332-2
Page Count: 214
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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