Told with deep empathy, this tale illuminates a little-known but relevant aspect of U.S. history and deftly explores...
In this debut historical novel, a girl and her family face harsh conditions in a German-American internment camp in Texas during World War II.
The daughter of a piano teacher and a math professor at the local college, Trudy Herman is a studious girl in sixth grade in Somerville, Virginia. She sorely misses her dead grandfather, a gentle man who taught her how to find the Pleiades in the night sky, but otherwise she leads a happy, normal life. That is, until three grim men show up at the Hermans’ front door, search their home, and seize Trudy’s father, a German immigrant, for reasons they won’t say. Trudy’s life falls apart. Her mother becomes a shrunken, fearful woman, and all of Trudy’s friends and neighbors shun her except for her classmate Eddie Gutschmidt, whose father was also taken. Eventually, Trudy, her mother, and Eddie’s family are forced to travel by train to Traybold, Texas, the site of a German-American internment camp. They carry on a reduced existence within the confines of a barbed-wire fence. Trudy finds comfort in books, Eddie’s friendship, and an old, cheerful woman named Ruth Schuler, but she is shocked by the guards’ cruelty toward “krauts” like her. Finally, Trudy’s father arrives and the family is reunited. Once the war is over, the Hermans end up in Mississippi, where they must rebuild their lives. Beck tends to tell more than show Trudy’s emotions (“Three wooden chairs were placed in a line….Two were occupied by Mom and me, and the third chair, where Dad should have been sitting, sat empty. My mood matched the room’s gray, and I felt lonely”). Still, the world through Trudy’s eyes is astonishingly vivid, from the fetid scent of a house her family stays in to the sight of a sandhill crane on a riverbank. And the sensitive and scrupulous protagonist is cleareyed on how people can adapt to anything, even internment, but maintains that the experience warps everyone: “Our lives took on a normalcy, but that troubled me even more. How could being kept inside a barbed-wire fence like cattle feel normal?”
Told with deep empathy, this tale illuminates a little-known but relevant aspect of U.S. history and deftly explores privilege and injustice in their many forms.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-377-9
Page Count: 283
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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