A gripping saga that roots excruciating betrayals in a nation’s tragic history.
Italy’s buried wartime secrets lead to shocking violence in this labyrinthine historical mystery.
Martini’s novel, based on a real incident, centers around a July 1945 massacre in which left-wing partisans murdered a group of alleged Fascists imprisoned in the town of Schio in northeastern Italy. At the story’s heart is a memoir recounting the investigation of the crime by Lieutenant John Casanova of the United States Army, who combs through possible motives that might include revenge for Fascist atrocities, personal vendettas, and a communist plot to start an insurrection. His sleuthing unearths murky relationships between partisan leader Giulio Moro, pro-Fascist businessman Ettore Godin (who was shot but survived), and Renzo Balbo, the partisan who Godin says shot him. Casanova, an Italian-American who despises Italy, probes disdainfully into the corruption and violence but eventually stoops to unconscionable methods—think beatings and cockroaches—in his quest for answers. The novel then shifts to Balbo’s account of the Italian Army’s disastrous retreat from Stalingrad in January of 1943, an ordeal of frostbite, carnage, cannibalism, and betrayal that he endured with Moro and Godin. Framing the novel is the present-day narrative of Alessandro Lago, an Italian journalist who discovers among his dying father’s papers a photograph of Balbo, Moro, and Godin on the Russian Front alongside his uncle Alessandro; the picture entangles him with a mysterious woman who leads him to Casanova’s and Balbo’s writings and neo-Fascist politics. Martini writes in three distinctive registers, switching between Lago’s moody, atmospheric meditation on blighted lives, Casanova’s noirlikedetective story, and Balbo’s grisly, surreal war epic. (“[A] mortar [shell] land[ed] not twenty meters from me, hitting a sled full of injured men and I could see parts of them, pieces of their bodies fully formed cartwheel into the air…I felt that wave of bone and meat rip into my face like shrapnel.”) Martini’s storytelling is vivid and gripping, and his writing reads like lean, muscular poetry. The result is a terrific read with real psychological depth beneath the hard-bitten prose.
A gripping saga that roots excruciating betrayals in a nation’s tragic history.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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