A sterling effort from an intelligent and entertaining popular novelist.
In Shreve’s ninth novel, a bitter strike racks the New Hampshire coastal community that also provided the setting for Fortune’s Rocks (1999).
Newlyweds Honora and Sexton Beecher move there in June 1929. Twenty-year-old Honora barely knows her husband; Sexton loves his wife but quickly proves just as shifty as you’d expect a traveling salesman to be. He cuts a few corners to get them a mortgage just days before the stock market crashes, loses his job, and is forced to go to work at one of the local textile mills that have been slashing wages and speeding up production for years before the Depression began. Shreve cogently contrasts the Beechers’ fearful, middle-class scrimping with the more desperate situations of mill workers like Francis, an 11-year-old who works the bobbins, and McDermott, at 20 already nearly deaf from the looms’ noise. On the other end of the social spectrum is wealthy, hard-drinking, promiscuous Vivian Burton, whose friendship with Honora draws her into the strike that erupts after yet another pay cut. Falling in with labor activists gives Vivian a new perspective on life: “My sort,” she says to McDermott, “seem, well, despicable, really”—though that doesn’t prevent her from rewriting a communist strike leader’s cliché-ridden leaflet in one of the novel’s few humorous scenes. Honora and Vivian gain purpose and moral stature over the narrative’s 15-month course, but the men don’t fare so well. Sexton’s stupid (but convincingly motivated) recklessness provokes a violent climax that puts an end to any hope for the burgeoning tenderness between Honora and McDermott, while Francis sees the two people he most loves brutally murdered. The mood here is dark, but Shreve’s fans will take some comfort in her typically elegant, lucid prose, evocative of the natural world and subtly probing of character. Even the abrupt entrance of death, so annoying in The Last Time They Met (2001), here seems plausible and appropriate.
A sterling effort from an intelligent and entertaining popular novelist.Pub Date: April 9, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-78081-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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