Strained at times, but, still, a grand, sweeping saga.
An ambitious tale of a once-happy family changed forever by one year in the 1960s when the father’s participation in Cold War intrigue goes tragically awry.
Bestselling MacDonald (the Oprah-picked Fall on Your Knees, 1997) interweaves Cold War tensions and the space race to give her story an intriguing, if at times overreaching, plot, but that also makes for a long and padded read. The McCarthy family is posted back to Canada in 1962 after serving in Germany. The Cold War is at its height, the Cuban Missile Crisis is heating up, as is the race to the moon, and Jack McCarthy has been picked to head an officer’s training school in Ontario. His French-Canadian wife Mimi and their two children, Mike and Madeleine, are happy to be home, but must soon face unexpected challenges. Eight-year-old Madeleine is close to Jack, but she doesn’t tell him or Mimi about her teacher Mr. March, who makes her and other girls stay after school to perform sexually abusive “exercises.” Jack soon has his secrets, too, when an old friend, British diplomat Simon Crawford, asks him to look after a defector, an East German scientist, now in transit to the US. Then Claire, a classmate of Madeleine’s, is brutally raped and murdered, and both Madeleine and Jack face a moral crisis. Rick, the adopted son of a Holocaust survivor, is arrested, and Jack could save him—but that would blow his cover. And Madeleine won’t lie, as requested, about where she saw Rick that day. Rick is sentenced, and a stricken Jack, who never recovers from the guilt, requests a transfer. Madeleine, a lesbian now in her 30s, takes up the narrative. Though a successful comedian, she’s suddenly experiencing panic attacks that lead her to find out who really killed Claire that long-ago afternoon.
Strained at times, but, still, a grand, sweeping saga.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-057895-5
Page Count: 736
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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