An enjoyable debut, the book is distinguished by a fluid, lyrical style that is equally at home with serious and comic...
Following the death of his eccentric mother, the famous mathematician Rachela Karnokovitch, a meteorologist must deal with a flock of her colleagues desperate to lay their hands on her rumored masterpiece.
As we learn in excerpts from her unpublished memoir, Rachela was a Polish native who discovered the wonders of math as a child living in the Soviet work camp where her father served time. Schooled in Moscow, she defected to the U.S., where her star quickly rose at the University of Wisconsin. Her middle-aged son, Sasha, has made his own mark, albeit in a quieter way, as head of a research program at the University of Alabama. A low-key sort who has never quite overcome his mistake of a marriage, Sasha is unprepared for the onslaught of his mother's old friends—and enemies—at her home in Madison. While ostensibly paying their respects by sitting shiva, the Jewish mourning ritual, they go through drawers, rip up floorboards and even listen intently to the family's aged parrot for clues to where Rachela has hidden her solution to the Navier-Stokes equation. Though Rojstaczer doesn't have the spikey wit of Gary Shteyngart or the inventiveness of Michael Chabon, his steadiness and empathy are appealing in their own ways. A geophysicist, he brings an added dimension to the book's discussions of scientific matters. He's very good at exploring the apparent divide between genius and happiness as well as the intersection of cultures.
An enjoyable debut, the book is distinguished by a fluid, lyrical style that is equally at home with serious and comic matters.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-14-312631-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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