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THE NIGHT TRAVELERS

A worthwhile story with some excess material.

A bloodline of stubborn, courageous women navigates the horrors of World War II and its rippling aftereffects.

“Lilith,” Ally Keller murmurs reverently at first sight of her newborn daughter, the product of her brief but intense union with a Black German musician. “Her name means light.” And despite the fact that Ally—a freethinking, progressive German writer—must confine Lilith’s childhood within the increasingly oppressive, racist strictures of Nazi Germany, where Lilith is considered a mischling (a derogatory term for people of mixed-race ancestry), she proves an unquestionable beacon in Ally’s life. A preternaturally intelligent girl who learns the Pythagorean theorem by age 5 and begins studying Shakespeare at 6, Lilith grows up in relative stability, reading Ally’s poetry and imbibing the wisdom of Herr Professor (a Jewish literature scholar driven from his university). Lilith and her mother obsessively follow via radio the groundbreaking career of Jesse Owens, whose meteoric rise to greatness symbolizes the freedom that Lilith craves; meanwhile, in Nazi Germany, they’re able to venture outside only at night or during the rain, else risking harassment. As the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht incite increasing chaos and S.S. raids worsen, Lilith appears before the German commission for racial purity, which labels her “inferior,” risking sterilization by the state. What follows is Ally’s immensely painful choice to send Lilith away on a departing ship, accompanied only by the Herzogs, a fleeing Jewish couple who become Lilith’s de facto parents. After what Lilith terms her “first death,” she must begin an entirely new life in Cuba, constantly aware of the way the past peeks through the cracks of her new reality—and unsure of her mother’s fate. In narrative sections that track the lives of Lilith’s daughter and other female descendants, the women grapple with the deep scars wrought by World War II along with motherhood, racism, and survivor’s guilt; the novel carefully investigates factors that shape identity along with the concept of unresolved memory. Correa’s scope here is impressive—the narrative sections span Havana to Berlin and 1931 to 2015—though the breadth sometimes lends the sense of an overstretched narrative, reducing dramatic intensity. Its characters, though, are complex and singular; their interiors are richly drawn and illustrate how history unfolds in increasingly complex ways within individual psyches despite passing time and space. Readers will appreciate the emotional payoff and emerge from the novel with a satisfying sense of catharsis even if it takes a while to achieve.

A worthwhile story with some excess material.

Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-501-18798-8

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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

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THE WEDDING PEOPLE

Uneven but fitfully amusing.

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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

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