The hidden homosexuality proves an affecting premise, and the historical detail is well situated.
The former editor, and wife of blockbuster author Eric Van Lustbader, tries her hand at fiction with a sprawling, character-packed, emotionally spiraling historical saga joining the fates of two families in post-WWI New York.
In the army, two young men from very different families forge a lifelong friendship. Jed Gates is a wealthy mama’s boy, scion of the Gates department store family; handsome, ambitious David Warshinsky is a poor Jewish kid from the Lower East Side. When he enlists, David severs ties to his family and girlfriend, aiming toward a future that’s different from his seamstress mother’s dreams for him. With a new surname, Shaw, he begins to work his way up in the department store, gaining the admiration of patriarch Joseph Gates and the love of Jed’s headstrong, social-activist sister Lucy. Meanwhile, Jed is directed to marry a suitable girl, Abby, by his icy, controlling mother. Jed has no interest in sleeping with women; in fact, he is in love with David but unable to recognize the truth or to act on it. Their marriage is a disaster for poor, spoiled Abby, though not before Henry is born. In turn, David marries featherbrained Cissy, but their union is also wrecked, in this case by David’s refusal to impregnate his wife or to reveal his Jewish heritage. The crisis of tertiary relatives intrudes: Zoe, Jed’s equestrian aunt, is locked in an abusive marriage to villainous, alcoholic Monty, who punishes the disapproving Gates family by blackmailing Jed after spotting him with a homosexual lover. Encouraged by David’s newly single status, Lucy finally declares her love, and together they mend the rupture with his sister Sarah and his Jewish past. However, the two friends’ suppression of their respective secrets ends in a terrible tragedy.
The hidden homosexuality proves an affecting premise, and the historical detail is well situated.Pub Date: June 13, 2006
ISBN: 0-765-31556-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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