Panoramic in its sense of history, intensely personal in its sense of drama—a wonderfully sad yet joyous read.
This remarkably moving and assured debut, the first in a planned trilogy, tells the story of Bangladesh’s 1971 war for independence through the eyes of a widow who will do anything to ensure her children’s survival.
The widow Rehana has remade her life more than once. With her once wealthy Muslim family, she was forced to leave Calcutta for Karachi during Partition; after an arranged marriage she moved to Dhaka with her husband; when her husband died, she temporarily lost her children to her wealthy brother-in-law back in Karachi, until she found the financial means—how and where is her shameful secret—to bring them back a year later. Ten years later, Rehana lives contentedly with her son Sohail and daughter Maya, both politically active students at the local university. Then civil war breaks out and her children sweep Rehana into political events. Sohail, who has always been a pacifist, joins the resistance fighters. Maya, whose best friend has been raped and murdered by the Pakistanis, becomes a resistance spokeswoman. Anam keeps Rehana grounded in a daily routine—there are evocative scenes of cooking, of sewing blankets out of saris, of going to market—that brings Bangladesh to life amid the chaos and carnage of the war. Soon Rehana is hiding not only supplies and armaments on her property, but also a wounded resistance officer. At first she resents him for his role in endangering her son’s life, but growing to love him, as years earlier she grew to love her husband, she confides the secret theft that gave her financial survival and her guilt at losing her children even temporarily. Ultimately, she must make a final horrendous sacrifice to keep them safe again. Rehana is a memorable literary achievement, exemplifying motherhood in all its complexity and intensity. That her relationships with her children are difficult, often prickly, only makes her maternal passion that much more believable and heartrending.
Panoramic in its sense of history, intensely personal in its sense of drama—a wonderfully sad yet joyous read.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-147874-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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