A romantic yet historically evocative depiction of two pioneering women’s intertwined lives.
In 1926, at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, a young nurse sacrifices her career and later the love of her life to save a premature baby who will become her daughter.
“To qualify as a nurse, I must master it all,” Althea Anderson reflects of her profession’s scientific requirements. “But to serve as one, I must pretend I know none of it.” In 1926, in a male-dominated obstetrics ward, she sees premature babies, their parents typically poor, consigned to die because, as one doctor says, “It is not our place to question God’s plan,” even though a doctor in Coney Island is saving such infants daily by putting them in incubators...and displaying them as a sideshow to fund his initiative. Haunted by one child’s death in particular, Althea smuggles another newborn, who weighs a little over 2 pounds, out of the hospital and places her in the admirable care of Dr. Couney at Luna Park. “Live babies!” the barker tells the boardwalk crowd. “All the world loves a baby!” Inside, however, all is calm and competence, and Margaret thrives. And Althea’s life, already altered by a single act of mercy, becomes one of secrecy and sacrifice. “Love makes us do things we would not otherwise consider,” one character observes, and though the novel occasionally strays into such sentimental clichés, Althea remains an engaging and convincing heroine. As does Stella Wright, the novel’s other narrator. A young special education teacher in 1950, Stella confronts that era’s brand of male callousness and societal bigotry with its undercurrents of eugenics and racism. Still mourning her recently deceased mother and disturbed by her husband’s wartime PTSD, Stella is drawn back into her mother’s past, where true identities and destinies are deftly revealed. “She made me who I am,” Stella realizes, “and I need her help to figure out who I can become....”
A romantic yet historically evocative depiction of two pioneering women’s intertwined lives.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-32804-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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