A historically bold and dramatically lively war tale.
In this historical novel, Jewish musicians running from the Nazis are helped by Roman Catholic priests in a Sicilian village during World War II.
In 1942, Pope Pius XII finds himself in a precarious position, torn between a desire to denounce the atrocities committed by the Nazi and Soviet militaries and the importance of maintaining the Vatican’s neutrality, which allows it to become a sanctuary for Jewish refugees. While rhetorically cautious, the pope acts with great boldness, encouraging Catholic priests to help disenfranchised Jews. LoCoco astutely creates a story about a plan devised with the Vatican’s imprimatur, a scheme to hide Jewish musicians in the fictional Bellafortuna, a Sicilian village with a reputation for its “immense passion for music.” But this is a perilous undertaking—the Jews will hide in plain sight, posing as Italians, assuming new identities, and learning rudimentary Italian. The tale focuses on three Jewish musicians—Alfred Keller, Heinrich Bergman, and Kurt Hofmann—who narrowly escaped death at the hands of Hitler’s henchmen. The plot can devolve into an excess of sentimentality—Heinrich, a talented violinist, rediscovers the joy of music in Bellafortuna, a scene wrought with melodrama. He thanks Annika Adler, the wife of a composer, for helping him overcome his sadness about his mother’s death and reigniting his enthusiasm for music: “You have opened my heart to music again and to life, and you have brought to my mind the memory of my dear mother. For all of that, I am forever grateful.” But the book as a whole is impressively nuanced and articulates an account of the Catholic Church’s opposition to Hitler’s despotism not always accurately reflected in the historical literature. Instead of being cowardly or indifferent, the controversial Pope Pius is portrayed in this novel as diplomatically prudent as well as deeply constrained by the Vatican’s tenuous political power. The author’s fictional story about the musicians and his interpretation of the Vatican’s wartime actions are based on his research, including the “historical fact that Italians hid the Jews.” Whether or not this portrait of the pope is ultimately proved to be correct by historians, it is an impressively balanced one. The tale takes admirable pains to furnish readers with what LoCoco considers a fuller picture of the Vatican’s position during the war.
A historically bold and dramatically lively war tale.Pub Date: June 1, 2022
ISBN: 9780972882491
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Cefalutana Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 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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