An unhurried and painterly novel of a musician finding her voice.
Stark follows the fortunes of a talented violinist and her family into the tumults of Reconstruction in this sequel to Certain Liberties (2019).
It’s 1871 in New York City, and the pioneering concert violinist Emily de Koningh is now a wife and mother. Her husband, Corey, is a pianist and usually her accompanist, although lately he’s been away helping his father rebuild their textile business in the aftermath of the Civil War. As Corey travels in the South, Emily is left to run the stately New York mansion and raise their young sons, William and Connie—largely by herself. Frustrated and lonely, she leans on the friendship of her old music teacher, Robert Haussmann, who now tutors her children, and on her beloved Guarneri violin: “Some people couldn’t escape the confines of their personal worlds, no matter where they were, but she had a magic passkey to open whatever enclosure she was in, and she always carried it with her.” Meanwhile, Corey has developed an appreciation for the wild saloon music of the South—and for the region’s hospitable women, as well. This attraction alerts him to the lack of passion that he feels in his own marriage. He travels with his father, Klaas, who spent the war in behind the lines in the Confederacy. When Corey telegrams Emily to say he will be delayed in the South, she asks Robert to accompany her to Chicago, where she has performance dates that must be met. Unwittingly, Emily is headed into the Great Chicago Fire with her kids, her priceless violin, and a pregnancy she’s keeping secret from the public. As the de Koninghs do their small part to repair the republic, despite the many lingering grievances of the war, can Emily and Corey reconstruct their marriage for its next chapter?
Stark’s prose is elegant and ornate, evoking the Victorian novels that were popular during the time period: “There it was again, that word ‘guilt,’ or ‘gilt’—gold-plated remorse—that’s what the North offered the South. She smiled at the nuance just one less letter could suggest, like the addition or subtraction of an eighth note on a score.” As in the previous novel, Stark weaves her characters’ trajectories into the larger events of the time. Emily is shown to be a spirited and sympathetic lead. Indeed, it’s not uncommon that other characters acknowledge her many virtues—an unnecessary choice on the part of the author, as readers already get a fine sense of her good points. The New York–based protagonists have close and recent ties to Europe, and through their adventures in the South and Middle West, the author manages to tease out a larger portrayal of an emerging American modernity. The book unfolds at a leisurely pace, and the situations never become quite as messy as the reader might expect them to get. Still, Stark’s detailed recreation of the time period—culturally, linguistically, and philosophically—should please those who like nothing better than escaping into previous eras.
An unhurried and painterly novel of a musician finding her voice.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2020
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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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