A thoroughly researched and sensitively written wartime drama.
A Russian family struggles through World War II in Parry’s debut historical novel.
In January 1941, Soviet widow Sofya Karavayeva is first-chair violinist at the prestigious Leningrad Philharmonic, and she lives with her son, Aleksandr; daughter-in-law, Katya; and beloved teenage granddaughter, Yelena, in the city. After Aleksandr is arrested by the Soviet secret police and sent to a labor camp, Katya is kicked out of the Communist Party and put to work in a factory, and Sofya is demoted to a position with the Radio Committee Orchestra. Grandmother and granddaughter are safe, however, and soon, each finds love: Sofya with her former lover Vasili Antonov, a navy admiral and recent widower who’s secretly the father of her son, Aleksandr; and Yelena with Pavel Chernov, a handsome peer who, like her grandmother, plays violin. When Nazi Germany attacks the Soviet Union that summer, the men are called to fight for their country while the women struggle on the home front, hoarding food, lining up for dwindling rations each day, and eventually taking in two young children, sweet Alyosha and spirited Sasha, whose parents have been lost to war. Both Vasili and Pavel are constantly exposed to life-threatening danger, while Sofya and Yelena struggle to stay alive in a once-grand city now almost completely depleted of resources. In an author’s note, Parry says that she was motivated to write this novel due to what she saw as a lack of Eastern European representation in World War II narratives, and the result is a well-researched work that incorporates real-life historical figures, such as navy commissars, orchestra conductors, and journalists, as well as fully realized fictional characters with difficulties and triumphs of their own. Although the slow-paced novel tends to get bogged down in abundant details, sometimes to the point of repetition, it remains a compelling story, effectively told through the alternating perspectives of Sofya, Yelena, Pavel, and Vasili.
A thoroughly researched and sensitively written wartime drama.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-267-7
Page Count: 344
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2022
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 dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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