The rest of the story is well-told, though we’ve seen most of it before: Just add gin to your favorite wartime romance and...
A wartime love story in the tradition of Atonement—and perhaps The Winds of War, and perhaps Gone with the Wind....
The opening pages of screenwriter (Gladiator, Shadowlands) and novelist (I Could Love You, 2011, etc.) Nicholson’s modestly pitched saga frame the problem beautifully: A granddaughter does not know her grandmother, just as her mother does not know her own grandmother—and the members of the Greatest Generation, whose story this is, scarcely know themselves. In the early years of World War II, Kitty Teale, who simply adores driving, rushes off to volunteer for service as an ambulance driver. She is class conscious, but less so than her hoity-toity pal Louisa, who grumbles assonantly, “I don’t mind being bossed about by lesbians in trilbies...so long as they’re my own class.” Class enters into things when those wary winds buffet Kitty into the arms of Royal Marine commando Ed—though, to complicate matters, fellow warrior Larry, no slouch himself, emerges as a good candidate for a spirited snogging. What’s a girl to do? Well, when Ed returns from the front a much decorated hero, the decision seems fixed—save that, in postwar India (one wants to pronounce it In-juh, of course), and in a milieu where Ed is hell-bent on drinking his memories of battle away, Larry’s still ripe to enact his realization that “time is so short, death comes so soon....We must love each other.” Or, to echo Auden, die—and there’s some of that, too. The best moments of this well-written if predictable story come when Ed and Larry are interacting: Their relationship is fraught, intimate, wary (“Time to beat a retreat,” says Ed, meaningfully. “Back to the boats and sail away.”) and affecting.
The rest of the story is well-told, though we’ve seen most of it before: Just add gin to your favorite wartime romance and stir.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8713-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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