A smart and unexpectedly moving wartime drama.
A historical novel, set during World War II, in which a German soldier seeks to escape war-torn Berlin.
Monahan’s work opens in January 1945 in the ruined German capital, where a damaged local man is wandering the rubble. Reinhardt Schmidt has been wounded, and as he recovers, he finds himself deeply disillusioned (“to the generals who never saw me,” he bitterly reflects, “my name was Cannon Fodder”). He now works in the Relocation Bureau of a city that’s been devastated by three years of relentless Allied bombings, and even as he receives a performance award from Adolf Hitler himself (whom he thinks of as a monster), Schmidt is scheming to escape the city under an assumed name before the Führer dies and the swiftly approaching Russians arrive to exact vengeance. As Monahan’s narrative unfolds, Schmidt finds that his plan is complicated by two things: the fact that his picture is taken at his award ceremony, opening up the chance that a newspaper reader will recognize him, and the fact that he’s been transferred to the Berlin police, where he’ll be under scrutiny. Schmidt hopes to swap a dead body for his living one, and use counterfeit paperwork to escape the city without alerting anyone, including cop Helmut Pfeiffer, to the scheme. There are many other variables at play, of course: Schmidt must keep a worried eye on everything from his own work schedule to the jittery rhythms of the war itself: “I needed after-work hours to create another relocation permission certificate,” he worries at one point, callously adding that he “also depended on one or two days off in case the weather cleared and another large air raid should produce a new crop of corpses.”
Monahan shapes his story with a great deal of skill and considerable, low-key eloquence, as in this passage, in which Schmidt walks with a young Jewish woman he’s known since his teens: “I followed after Ruth into the slate-shadowed city of the dead,” he writes vividly at one point. “Despite the darkness she moved with assurance, gliding through the markers and statues with the noiseless grace of a ghost.” The author also wisely makes the decision to portray his main character, who resembles an Aryan figure on a Nazi recruitment poster, as a deeply flawed and ambivalent figure. Readers will sympathize with the urge to leave a city that’s referred to as a “de facto prison,” but they’ll squirm at the main character’s amoral, by-any-means-necessary approach. Monahan’s dialogue is sharp as well, and the author allows it to carry considerable weight in the narrative. In one representative exchange, a character taunts Schmidt for his seemingly robotic attitude, which appears to lean into the Third Reich’s toxic mythology of manliness. “I have all my emotions,” he snaps back. “I'm simply trying to control them until the war ends.” It’s a mark of Monahan's narrative skill that readers can hear Schmidt’s sincerity in such moments while neither believing him nor sympathizing with him.
A smart and unexpectedly moving wartime drama.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2022
ISBN: 9798985089417
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Words Take Flight Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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