An absorbing tale for the patient reader.
A Dutch novel about loss, identity, and the lasting effects of war.
In 1922 in Flanders, four years after the end of the Great War, many wives still desperately seek their missing husbands. Noon Merckem has been kept in an asylum for four years, his name assigned to him by the doctors. Not physically injured, he has shell shock and has completely lost his memory. Several women try to claim him, but they cannot properly identify him. But Julienne Coppens correctly says he has a certain scar from an old accident, and against medical advice he is released into her care. She tells him his real name is Amand Stephaan Coppens, he’s the father of their two children, proprietor of a photography shop with his name in the window, and she has been waiting for him for eight years. Already her family is living on the margins: She breaks a rabbit’s neck in her backyard and cooks it up with prunes for supper, and she struggles to pay the rent. Quite an adjustment lies ahead: “She has him back and yet she doesn’t,” because he doesn’t remember her. At first, they are not physical, but eventually they enjoy the warmth of each other’s bodies in bed. “And weeks of outrageous happiness follow,” but it hardly lasts. She takes charge of his life and his well-being. And he “feels nothing, as if she’s gutted and skinned him and left nothing but an empty carcass.” More dramatically, he suffers tumultuous nightmares and once awakens in shock to realize he is nearly strangling her. He dreams of the battlefield, and tells her he vaguely remembers red flares, machine-gun fire, exploding shells, and being buried alive under a pile of dead bodies. But he does not trust these memories, and he begins to wonder if he can trust Julienne. This is a story about healing a soldier’s mind after surviving years of carnage, and it is about restoring mutual trust and love after so much has happened. Stylistic quirks may be problematic or not, according to readers’ tastes. It is almost 600 pages of run-on sentences with many including up to 100 words and 10 comma-separated clauses. And the author begins most paragraphs with “And.” And she buries all dialogue in the narrative.
An absorbing tale for the patient reader.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9781954404328
Page Count: 576
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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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