A nonfictional treatment might have better served this story.
The sensational true saga of the "waifs of the Titanic" is unevenly fictionalized in Imrie’s sixth novel.
This is a reconstruction, based on exhaustive mining of musty records more than a century old, of how two French toddlers, a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, wound up on a Titanic lifeboat. An afterword by writer Fidelis Morgan, Imrie’s researcher and fellow actress, reveals that this painstaking investigation also removes blame from the little boys’ mother, Marcella Navratil, where history had assigned it, and places it squarely on the shoulders of their father, couturier Michael Navratil. Fleeing divorce, a custody battle, and bankruptcy in Nice, with more than 30,000 embezzled francs, Michael kidnaps the boys and, impersonating a business associate, boards the RMS Titanic, where his fateful comeuppance awaits. The first half of the book chronicles the travails of Marcella, a naïve Niçoise seamstress, who, at 17, falls under Michael’s sway and marries him. A brief honeymoon period progresses to spousal abuse after the births of their two sons. Marcella files for divorce, a daring move for a woman in 1911. Much of the research described in Morgan’s afterword is shoehorned into the fictional treatment, where it distracts from the dramatic arc. For example, the fact that Michael was abetted in the couple’s hasty and secret London marriage by Paul Kühne, whose restaurant also figured in a scandalous attempted murder/suicide, is an intriguing real-life coincidence with no relevance to the action here, yet Imrie belabors this nonexistent connection. Similarly, Michael’s American friends the Kirchmanns may have taken his side in the domestic dispute, but attempts to concoct a more sinister motive for their antagonism toward Marcella unduly expand their peripheral role. After a padded and digressive first half, the most gripping portion of the book belongs not to Marcella but to plucky New Yorker Margaret Bechstein Hays, the focus of the story’s second half, along with the always riveting Titanic disaster.
A nonfictional treatment might have better served this story.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63557-788-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
