A meticulously detailed historical drama with high stakes and compelling characters.
A novel set mostly in the 20th century features a weary sex worker, a German immigrant, and a transcendental love story.
Springing from interviews, archives, and the oral storytelling of Bruggeman’s great-grandfather, this fictionalized account of a romance in the early 1900s centers on two distinctive characters. Tempa, a 33-year-old sex worker, has few expectations for her life. Born Lou Taylor, she found herself in a tailspin when she lost most of her family at age 15 to an influx of yellow fever. Though she miraculously survived and reunited with her estranged sister, Sarah, the woman’s cruel husband, Mr. Marshall, only further obliterated Lou’s warmth and hopes. He eventually sent her against her will to work in an upscale “prostitution home” in Montana. Cut to nearly two decades later, and Lou, now wielding the name Tempa as a form of protection from her own past, is as destitute as she’s ever been, living hand to mouth in Stateline, Nevada. She is no longer providing services to “important men, gentlemen with fat waistcoats and gold toothpicks,” but instead to anyone begging for cheap relief from his labors in the nearby mines. It is here, nearly prepared to take her own life were it not for her companion Belle, that Tempa meets Henry, equally imperiled after fleeing Germany and his domineering stepfather. Though Tempa has been weathered by life and sees few prospects, Henry’s tenderness, principles, and boyish charm induce in her “an odd sense of intimacy” that leads them deeply and irrevocably to each other. The novel is admirably crafted, its characters and setting unfolding in such an organic way that readers cannot help but perceive the realities that inspired them. With elegant and resonant prose, the author revives an era now over a century removed, animating “deep pockmarks” in a young girl’s cheeks filled “with flyspecks of shadow” and portraying “the sun” as a “silver navel on the belly of the sky.” The relationship that unfolds between Tempa and Henry is particularly vivid and painful, a gripping chronicle of two characters with few remaining hopes fighting against and eventually relinquishing themselves to what little good remains.
A meticulously detailed historical drama with high stakes and compelling characters.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9798987270400
Page Count: 441
Publisher: SKINNY LEG PRESS
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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 sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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