A vivid and insightful historical novel by a debut author.
In Obara’s novel, a young Polish woman shows indomitable courage in the face of the occupation of her country during World War II.
In 1939, Aniela Bartosz (née Majewska) has a wonderful life in Kraków. She’s married to a good man, Henryk Bartosz, and they have a beautiful daughter, Wanda. But when the Nazis march into Poland, the Bartoszes’ dream turns into a nightmare. Aniela’s father, Professor Bogdan Majewski, is arrested with the whole faculty of his university and dies in a labor camp; Henryk goes off to join the defense forces and then the resistance against the Nazis. Strong-willed Aniela is seen as a troublemaker by the Nazis and winds up in Auschwitz—but before that happens, little Wanda is taken from her mother and given to a German family to raise as their own. Aniela later becomes the secretary of a camp functionary named Joachim Beckmann, who rapes her and then convinces himself that he’s in love with her; she suffers through this because he promises that he’ll try to find out what happened to Wanda. Later, however, she’s sent to Blok 42, the camp brothel for Polish prisoners. Blok 42 was a real place at Auschwitz, and the author’s discovery of this fact inspired the novel. Obara is Polish American and the daughter of immigrants, so she knows the culture of the Bartoszes well, and her prose is skillful throughout, as when she describes a bombing as “obliterating…men in an arc of chaotic energy.” And she captures the arrogance and cruelty of the Nazis, as well their blind hypocrisy, as when Beckmann warns Aniela that Russians have no ethics. Aniela is a strong and memorable character who achieves “a fundamental belief in…what that life was worth.” The book’s last lines are truly stunning.
A vivid and insightful historical novel by a debut author.Pub Date: March 28, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Vanguard Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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