First-novelist Moran, who edits W magazine, has chosen an unconventional debut subject: a childhood encounter with the shadow of Nazism and the consequences of ethnic prejudice, set in Austria during WW II. In the village of Sankt Vero, shopkeeper Martin Lukasser is approached by a Jewish doctor, Robert Weiss, in flight from the Nazis and seeking refuge. Years earlier, Weiss had performed an emergency appendectomy on Lukasser's son Niki. In return, Martin now constructs a tiny concealed room, scarcely larger than a box, in his barn and hides the doctor in it for two years, until the war ends. Weiss's only ``visitors'' are the now adolescent Niki and the latter's best friend Sigi, a blind girl. The pair listen raptly as ``our Jew'' tries to pass the time by telling the story of his life (and, more reluctantly, of his loves). This is, therefore, a coming-of-age novel, short on plot and of interest mainly for the smoothness of Niki's present-tense narration and for Moran's characterizations. Dr. Weiss is, as the teenagers see him, opaque; Niki is believably sensitive and observant; and Sigi is especially vividly drawn—she isn't at all long-suffering or saintly, and there are streaks of irritability and cruelty in her that, oddly enough, endear her to us. Moran writes amusingly of adolescent sexual curiosity and confusion, presenting the Nazi menace as more inconvenience and annoyance than threat to the beleaguered villagers who must billet Wehrmacht soldiers in their homes and safeguard their daughter's virtue. Unfortunately, the story's impact is blunted by its reliance on several clichÇd characters, the most glaring of which are a taciturn father whose stoic demeanor masks an embarrassing secret, and the beautiful, lonely schoolteacher whom obtuse townspeople mistake for a seductress. The novel invites, absorbs, but does not fully convince the reader. A commendable first effort, then, but flawed by some flat secondary figures and a rather slow pace.(Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection)
Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1997
ISBN: 1-57322-060-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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