As always, Dietrich (Hadrian’s Wall, 2004, etc.) has a firm grip on setting, but his cast is standard issue for historical...
A military juggernaut stands poised to conquer Europe, and it seems nothing can stop it. The year: 451.
At its head is Attila the Hun, so feared that the Roman Empire, shaking in its boots, has been shipping him annual payoffs just so he’ll leave them reasonably intact. But extortion is becoming unbearably expensive. What, then, are the alternatives? Diplomacy? Absurd. The Hun can neither read nor write, much less grasp the subtleties of a proper negotiation. What the Hun can do is butcher, shoot arrows over incredible distances with jaw-dropping accuracy, and ride pell-mell through Roman streets, “contemptuous of anyone slow enough to be trampled over.” If not diplomacy, how about treachery? To Emperor Valentinian and the rest of the Roman high command, that seems not merely sensible but viable. A plan is hatched: An imperial embassy will journey to Attila’s lair in far-off Hunuguri, ostensibly to parlay about the amount of the current year’s tribute. In reality, however, assassination is the object of the mission, since the Romans believe they have successfully corrupted a Hun lieutenant who can get close enough to Attila to be his Brutus. Joining the embassy—though ignorant of its darker aspects—is Jonas Alabanda, young, brave and callow. His fortunes are at a low ebb and his self-esteem lower still—thanks to Olivia having “discarded him like an old sandal” in favor of a richer suitor—so he’s signed on eagerly as embassy scribe and historian. In rough and ready Hunuguri, Jonas will lose his innocence, fall in love, best his enemies and, temporarily at least, help preserve the Roman Empire.
As always, Dietrich (Hadrian’s Wall, 2004, etc.) has a firm grip on setting, but his cast is standard issue for historical fiction—especially his underimagined, surprisingly pallid Attila, who couldn't scourge his way out of a paper bag.Pub Date: March 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-073499-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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