Smart, savvy, atmospheric work from a promising new talent.
A stage-struck Wisconsin farm girl discovers that musical theater is no refuge from real-world problems.
When Eleanor O'Hanlon hears that her favorite Broadway composer, Don Mannheim, is having an open-call audition to replace the star in his current hit, she cashes in the war bonds her parents have been saving for her wedding day to pay for a train ticket to New York. “I’m not some girl who wants to be on Broadway for the fame or glamour,” she tells Mannheim when someone else gets the part. “I understand this. I understand you….This is my life.” Intrigued, he hires her instead for the lead in his musical work in progress, A Tender Thing. An interracial love story is daring stuff for Broadway in 1958, and Eleanor is thrilled by the chance to work with her idol. Debut author Neuberger, who studied musical theater and writing at NYU, clearly knows the world she’s depicting; she brings to life with nice historical detail the rehearsal milieu, complete with a martinet director, unabashedly gay chorus boys, and a production taking shape with daily rewrites and new songs. Eleanor, who knows everything about musical theater and not much about real life, may be the only person in the company who doesn’t get why Don takes a special interest in her creatively and displays no interest in her increasingly open romantic overtures. She also doesn’t really think about what the public—let alone her parents—might think about Don’s deliberately button-pushing subject matter until scarily hostile protests erupt during Boston previews, although her savvy African American co-star, Charles Lawrence, has warned her. Charles is among the novel’s many sensitive characterizations, most notable of which is brilliant, conflicted Don: desperately lonely but coldly making use of others’ lives to feed his artistic needs. It’s Eleanor and Charles who show him the realistic finale his musical demands, and Eleanor’s happy ending is a highly qualified one suggesting that she, like Don, will find her deepest relationships in art.
Smart, savvy, atmospheric work from a promising new talent.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-08487-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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