A gripping historical saga that skillfully addresses the trauma of the Holocaust.
A Jewish family torn apart by Nazi and Soviet persecution struggles to reconnect in this historical novel.
Sanders’ tale braids together two different timelines. One, set in the mid-1970s, follows Sarah Byrne, a 24-year-old market researcher in Chicago who wants to find out more information about her mother Ilana’s mysterious past after her sudden death. To that end, Sarah approaches her maternal grandmother, Miriam—a prickly, suspicious elderly woman who initially refuses to talk to her, but grudgingly relents as Sarah plies her with home-cooked meals. Intertwining chapters follow the ordeal of Miriam and her Jewish family—husband Max, a prosperous dentist; young Ilana; and toddler son, Monya—in the Latvian capital of Riga during World War II. When the Soviets invade Latvia in 1940, the family’s house, money, and belongings are confiscated; things worsen a year later, when the Germans conquer the country. After a horrific tragedy, Miriam makes the wrenching decision to give Ilana and Monya away to her Lutheran maid, Gutte, who will conceal their Jewish identities and raise them as gentiles. Miriam endures intense horrors during the Holocaust, surviving due to her own grit, luck, and the occasional kindness of strangers. In the ’70s timeline, Sarah travels to the Soviet republic of Latvia to try to track down a family member; she has an unlikely romance but also experiences totalitarian terror herself when the KGB targets her. Sanders’ novel vividly recreates the nerve-wracking fear and carnage of wartime Riga, as well as the city’s feeling of grim paranoia during the late Soviet period. Her evocative prose reveals nuances of character in mundane domestic details (“Her grandmother dug through the meat loaf with her fork as if she were looking for buried treasure, or poison”) and bears witness to atrocities in a manner that’s all the more moving for its restraint and realism, as in a passage set just before a synagogue is burned: “The rabbi…began chanting the Shema in Hebrew, traditional last words for Jews, in a loud, unwavering voice. He walked into the synagogue. The doors clanged shut behind him.” The result is a searching exploration of how much is lost during tragedies, even by those who live on.
A gripping historical saga that skillfully addresses the trauma of the Holocaust.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-0063247895
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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