Smart, skillful entertainment.
A real-life train crash propels Donoghue’s latest work of historical fiction.
It begins on the Normandy coast on Oct. 22, 1895, as Mado Pelletier boards the eponymous train after buying some unspecified “supplies.” Donoghue displays her usual flair for in-depth research with the next scene, when 7-1/2-year-old Maurice Marland is confused by the 5-minute discrepancy between the times on the clocks over the station entrance and on the platform. The station clock is set ahead to prod tardy passengers, the train guard explains. Similar nuggets of train lore throughout—most notably detailed descriptions of the driver’s and stoker’s perfectly synchronized teamwork—add to rather than detract from the Hitchcockian suspense as readers wait for the crash. (It’s a nice touch that, reminiscent of Donoghue’s contemporary novels, the aforesaid driver and stoker, both men, are unspokenly in love.) The author assembles a large cast, many of whom are real-life figures, though some were not actually on the train. Readers won’t care as Donoghue imagines compelling inner lives for her factual and fictional characters. They include ammunitions manufacturer Jules-Félix Gévelot, who has secret proclivities; African American artist Henry Tanner, who finds a kindred spirit in Cuban-descended medical student Marcelle de Heredia, also the subject of prejudice; and Alice Guy, secretary to the head of Gaumont and Co., who battles sexism to convince her clueless boss there’s a future in moving pictures. About a third of the way through the trip, we learn that Mado, an anarchist, carries a bomb to blow up the train; her principal targets are deputies on their way to the National Assembly session, but she knows many innocent people will also die, and her private struggle with this knowledge joins other expertly juggled plot lines to render each character a sharply delineated individual. Donoghue doesn’t aspire here to the thematic depth that distinguishes such earlier historical novels as Life Mask (2004); this one’s just for fun.
Smart, skillful entertainment.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668082799
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Summit
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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
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
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