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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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