An immersive family tale with a slightly retro feel.
A family’s long-simmering tensions boil over during a trip to the old homestead in this literary novel.
Sept. 25, 1945. In the town of Navsari, India, lies Truth Bungalow, the formerly stately home of the wealthy Sanjana family. The Sanjanas no longer live there, but on this particular day, the family finds itself back to visit the pet tiger who resides in one of the rooms. Dolly is the family matriarch: the widow of Kavas and current wife of his younger brother, Phiroze, who lost an arm in World War I. Dolly has two adult sons: Sohrab by her first husband and Rustom by her second. The half brothers (and cousins) are as different as night and day: Sohrab is fair and prickly, English-educated with an English wife, Daisy Holiday, while Rustom is dark and scarred by his service in the more recent World War. As they sit in the garden discussing the perennial tensions of India, the back story of each of the family members is slowly revealed. Like their country, the tale of the Sanjanas is one of rises, stumbles, and redefinitions; like many families, the story is one of parentage, resentment, and legacy. All the while, the pet tiger, Victoria, lurks nearby like the hand of fate itself—and she is quite a bit larger than she used to be. Desai’s prose is fluid and exact, sketching the complex spaces that his characters inhabit. Here, a teenage Daisy watches the king of England parade down the street from the shoulders of a stranger: “Daisy felt she lived in three worlds: first, in London; next, in the presence of the King; and finally on the shoulders of a strange man who bore her as easily as if she were a child. The procession moved slowly, but seemed over in an instant. Raised above the crowd she had imagined the King waved for her alone.” The book is written in a mannered style that evokes the time period, and while the plot goes certain places that readers will expect, the author provides some surprises as well. The result is a wide-lensed meditation on power dynamics—within countries and within families.
An immersive family tale with a slightly retro feel.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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