Totalitarianism really can bring out the worst in people, suggests this eye-catching debut.
Twin Soviet ballerinas, born and orphaned on a single day in 1941, wreak havoc on each other’s lives.
It’s often said that love and hate are not opposites but closely related states, divided only by the proverbial thin line. Durham’s debut explores that idea through an operatic melodrama of a plot, boldly layered over a scaffolding of historical fact. In the opening scene, with the Siege of Leningrad in the offing, a 19-year-old dancer with no partner and no family goes through the throes of labor in a drab communal apartment. An hour later, a friend named Katusha arrives to find two infants wailing between the feet of a corpse. She grabs the girls, names them Maya and Natasha, and jumps on the last train to Tashkent to wait out the war. Fast forward 17 years: The girls are about to graduate from the feeder academy for the prestigious Kirov ballet when big news arrives. The Kirov plans to bring on a few new dancers ahead of an upcoming European tour, but to (hopefully) prevent defection, only one member of a family can join. Everyone knows it will be Natasha, the more gifted and popular sister—and no one can possibly imagine what’s ahead in this novel’s tornado of a plot. Durham provides an author’s note confirming the truth of the historical detail underlying the drama. Exchange visits of Russian and American ballet companies were indeed underway when the Cuban missile crisis broke; nearly all the details and characters involved here in the filming of the epic Soviet version of War and Peace come from life. Durham’s storytelling bravado is buttressed by impressive proclamations: "Only three things can be depended on in this world: that hemlines will rise and fall, that regimes will come and go, and that people will never change. This is why the Russians went on doing many of the same things under Brezhnev that they had under Khrushchev, which they’d also done under Stalin, which were the same things people everywhere have always done, no matter who exploited them: getting toothaches and falling in love, scolding their children and singing in taverns...writing terrible poetry and believing, even though they knew better, that some sort of brilliant fate awaited them."
Totalitarianism really can bring out the worst in people, suggests this eye-catching debut.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780063393615
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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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