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SKELETONS AT THE FEAST

From harrowing to inspiring.

Love in a time of war, 1945–1948.

Though occasionally groaning under the weight of its mighty themes—man’s-inhumanity-to-man, the-horror-the-horror, hope-rising-from-rubble—sheer storytelling here ultimately wins out, trumping the novel’s self-consciously mythic ambitions. It features a desperate trio: Anna Emmerich, Prussian aristocrat with “[h]air the color of corn silk,” her strapping lover, Callum Finnella, Scottish POW, and the mysterious Manfred, Wehrmacht corporal. Bohjalian (The Double Bind, 2007, etc.) brings them together for an epic romance based on a true-life World War II diary. Callum and Anna, her family in tow, are fleeing Russian invaders, crossing the iced-over Vistula as the Reich nears its bitter end. In their death throes, the Nazis have erupted into spasmodic violence—“live babies held by their ankles and swung like scythes into stone walls while their mothers were forced to watch…” Turns out Manfred’s not an actual fascist but the underground alias of Uri Singer, a Jewish refugee masquerading, exchanging his yellow Star of David for a “Nuremberg eagle made of bronze.” Outwitting the SA, who’d crammed him and his kin onto an Auschwitz-bound train, Uri had made a run for it, leaping from the boxcar. So, too, had Callum arrived dramatically into Anna’s life, jumping from an airplane machine-gunned behind enemy lines, then being captured, and finally farmed out to the Emmerichs as a forced laborer. The three lives intersect as the tale winds through savaged cities. Bohjalian is especially good at conveying the surreal “beauty,” the misshapen lyricism, of the war-torn landscape: “Even the stone church had collapsed upon itself…the once imposing pipes of the organ reshaped by heat and flame into giant copper-colored mushrooms.”

From harrowing to inspiring.

Pub Date: May 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-307-39495-8

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008

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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 NICKEL BOYS

Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...

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The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.

Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.

Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.

Pub Date: July 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019

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