An emotional and informative look at a shameful chapter of U.S. history that’s often swept under the rug.
A German-American girl becomes best friends with a Japanese-American girl in an internment camp during World War II.
Elise Sontag feels like a normal American teenager in 1943 even though her parents grew up in Germany. But then her father is arrested because the authorities think he might be a Nazi sympathizer, leaving Elise, her mother, and her brother all alone. Eventually, their family is able to be together again—in a family internment camp in Texas. Although there are others of German descent and also some Italians, the majority of the camp’s residents are of Japanese descent. People of different nationalities don’t often mix, but Elise becomes friends with Mariko, a Japanese-American teenager who lived in LA before coming to the camp with her parents and siblings. Elise and Mariko make big plans to move to Manhattan together when the war ends, but before that can happen, Elise’s family is sent back to Germany. As the war rages on, Elise never stops hoping that she and Mariko will eventually reunite even as the world crumbles around her. Meissner (As Bright as Heaven, 2018, etc.) has created a quietly devastating story that shows how fear and hatred during World War II changed (and even ended) the lives of many innocent Americans. Although Mariko is a central character, Elise’s personal growth is what drives the story—she must learn how to take control of her life even as she’s at the mercy of a government that sees her family as enemies. Readers may wish they could see more of Mariko’s experiences and hardships, but Elise’s story is still compelling and important.
An emotional and informative look at a shameful chapter of U.S. history that’s often swept under the rug.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49215-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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