A vividly imagined tapestry of turbulent times.
Upheaval in Tsarist Russia.
After Napoleon’s army retreated from Russia in 1812, years of brutal war left the populace impoverished, roiling with political unrest, and seething with rebellion. Epstein captures the tensions and contradictions of the time in a dramatic page-turner involving the tsar’s wayward younger son, Grand Duke Felix; Felix’s lover, Sasha, a soldier just returned from the war; and Sofia Azarova, a mesmerizing woman whom Sasha rescues when he finds her prostrate in the snow. Felix is an aristocrat out of central casting: “Tall, strong shouldered, and slim-waisted,” Sasha observes; at 28, “he still looked like a storybook prince.” His imperious father has exiled him to the sumptuous but far-off Catherine Palace, where he can draw on an ample allowance to indulge his “zest for grandeur.” But Felix’s life changes irrevocably when Sasha walks in carrying Sofia in his arms. Beautiful, fascinating, and undeniably charismatic, Sofia entices Felix, as if in a spell. Sasha warns him: There is something uncanny about her. She could be a witch, a vila, an evil spirit. But with Sofia’s arrival, Sasha realizes, “the trust between them had become fragile,” and Felix cannot heed his warning. Nor can Marya resist Sofia’s power. Marya is a member of the rebellious popular movement Koalitsiya, which agitates for “legal protections for workers and peasants, a reformed imperial council, religious freedom, [and] a clear path to emancipation for the country’s twenty million serfs.” Sofia infiltrates the movement, seductively manipulating Marya, at the same time as she insinuates herself into the palace. Violence, betrayal, murder, assassination: Sofia incites mayhem. “This was a woman who could change the shape of the world with a thought,” Marya comes to believe. Epstein interweaves a brisk plot with Eastern European folktales that reveal a vila’s insidious power. Sofia, hardly human, was “like a creature from legend, an ancient spirit hungry to watch something beautiful burn.”
A vividly imagined tapestry of turbulent times.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780385549097
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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