A disturbing, occasionally overwrought period piece with moments of grace and a sturdy hero.
A resilient young girl faces extreme poverty and violence during the 1930s and 1940s in Field’s historical novel.
The story begins in December of 1927 with a devastating automobile accident. Nineteen-year-old Margarete Bowerman Owens is en route to the Seattle train depot, fleeing her abusive husband and attempting to bring her 3-month-old daughter to her own mother’s farm in eastern Oregon. But Margarete’s car is brutally pushed off the road, and only baby Eleanor survives. Five years later, the musically inclined Eleanor is being raised by her maternal grandmother, Delores Bowerman. Although Delores, whose husband abandoned her, was already caring for her own five children at the time of the accident, she took her infant granddaughter when Eleanor’s father said he couldn’t care for her. It is a hardscrabble life, and little Eleanor feels bereft of a parent’s love. Still, in 1935, when the father she has not seen for seven years sues to regain custody of her, she elects to remain with her grandmother, despite his bribes of fine clothes and toys. This was a wise choice; several years later, when she travels to Seattle to help care for her aunt’s young children, her father sexually assaults her. Further trauma awaits her: The following years are filled with hopes, disappointments, and an impulsive, abusive marriage that she regrets immediately. The author effectively portrays the difficulties and desperation of poverty-level farm life through the years of the Great Depression: “Bread, milk from their Jersey cow Babe, last summer’s canned spinach, and a few eggs were all the family had for their dinners.” But there is also a throughline acknowledging the strength Eleanor gains from family ties and her young uncles’ loving support. Although the storyline frequently lapses into melodrama, complete with bad guys who are exceptionally evil, the evocative prose and several scenes of intense action make the narrative addictive. Vividly graphic scenes of violence animate the second half of the novel, culminating in a thrillingly explosive life-and-death battle.
A disturbing, occasionally overwrought period piece with moments of grace and a sturdy hero.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8988291107
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Forsythia Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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