By turns silly and tedious, exploitative and moralistic, the book fails on all fronts.
Anne Frank’s imaginary friend, Kitty, springs magically to life.
In a graphic-novel adaptation of his 2021 animated film, Israeli director/screenwriter Folman has found a new way to monetize the legacy of Anne Frank. The catalyst for the story’s events is—what else?—a burst of lightning, which by striking the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam at precisely the right moment, at precisely the right angle, causes Kitty—the imaginary friend to whom Anne Frank addressed each diary entry—to come to life. In illustrator Guberman’s hands, Kitty is red-haired and willowy, with the bland, wide-eyed expression of a typical Disney heroine—and for that matter, so is Anne, who is immediately stripped of all the qualities that made her so singular in her own life and work. Kitty, who can’t remember what happened to Anne and the rest of the Frank family, is launched on a series of inane adventures around Amsterdam while she tries to finish reading the diary (as she reads, she’s propelled into Anne’s memories). In one frame, Anne and Peter van Daan are listening to the radio. They’ve been growing closer. Meanwhile, Russian forces have broken through Leningrad. In the cel, Anne tips her head coyly toward Peter, her hand to her chin, her eyebrows raised flirtatiously. The caption reads, “One-third of the city’s population have died of starvation.” It’s a moment of bad taste that speaks to Folman’s overarching carelessness. In the end, Folman makes his story into a finger-wagging parable about how, at the same time that it profits from Anne Frank’s legacy, Europe is now failing the many migrants currently seeking refuge there. That Folman should level this charge, given how shamelessly he has exploited that legacy for his own use, is more than offensive—it borders on the obscene.
By turns silly and tedious, exploitative and moralistic, the book fails on all fronts.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781524749347
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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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