SOMEDAY WE'LL TELL EACH OTHER EVERYTHING

Name: SOMEDAY WE'LL TELL EACH OTHER EVERYTHING
Author: Daniela Krien
ISBN: 978-1-62365-084-1

by Daniela Krien ; translated by Jamie Bulloch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 2, 2014

Timed with the political and cultural momentum of East Germany’s dissolution, this deceptively elegant story reveals great...

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Dense and descriptive, this debut coming-of-age tale is set against the fascinating background of German reunification.

It's the summer of 1990, and the Berlin Wall has just come down, but in the countryside of East Germany, life remains largely unchanged since the war. Sixteen-year-old Maria is living with her boyfriend, Johannes Brendel, at his family’s house, one of the two independent farmsteads remaining in the area. The Brendels are successful farmers and accepting of wayward Maria, who has stopped going to school and made herself at home on the farm. She occasionally lends a hand but mostly reads The Brothers Karamazov and makes love with Johannes. Down the road, Henner’s farm is unkempt and wild, like Henner himself. He lives there alone and is known to drink to excess. The simplicity of Maria’s narration reveals her cleareyed awareness of those around her. Members of the Brendel family become plain as day with economic, descriptive grace. But despite her awareness and the stories she tells of her past—absentee father, ineffectual mother, the “honor” of attending a strict communist summer camp—Maria’s inner landscape, and her future, are unknown territories. She and Henner are drawn to each other with a blinding strength, and their collision and resulting affair are complicated and passionate. Maria fears and craves Henner; he in turn ranges from gentle to beastly. Their need for each other is absolute, even if the reasons behind it remain a mystery. The juxtaposition of Maria’s personal turmoil with the broader changes in the way of life around her pulls an unyielding line of tension throughout the novel.

Timed with the political and cultural momentum of East Germany’s dissolution, this deceptively elegant story reveals great emotional and cultural upheaval.

Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-62365-084-1

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Mobius

Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

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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

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.