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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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