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
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
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