A complex, compassionate novel about Germans coming to terms with their actions during WWII.
A Nazi official, his wife, and a traveling performer struggle to rebuild their lives in the immediate aftermath of World War II in Kosack and Overmann’s historical novel.
With “the chaos of the Nazis” behind him, former Gestapo higher-up Franz Tegge must now “survive the peace.” After he turns himself over to the Americans, he’s plucked from a POW camp by the U.S. Army’s secret service, which enlists him to track down fellow Nazis trying to evade capture by leaving Berlin. As Franz keeps tabs on his former colleagues, his wife, Mathilde, performs forced labor with other Nazi wives, clearing away rubble for long hours, clambering over “fragments of cobblestones left by burned-out tanks, eviscerated cars, tipped over advertisement pillars.” She brings her measly rations home to her extended family, including her own two children; her sister, a pious pastor’s wife; and her sister’s two kids. On a dare, two of the youngsters climb a bombed-out apartment building, and tightrope walker Camillo Baumgartner saves Mathilde’s eldest, Karla, from falling to her death. His act of generosity sparks a slow-burning flirtation between him and Mathilde, as well as plenty of raised eyebrows from neighborhood gossips, who disapprove of Germans socializing with “Gypsies.” Keja, a performer in Camillo’s troupe, likewise objects to the budding romance; however, she soon finds out that Camillo’s involvement with the Tegge clan may have less to do with his love for Mathilde than his past with Franz. As they use elements of classic melodrama, the authors sometimes let their prose overheat: “Irrational, powerful fear tore at Mathilde’s stomach as her fear became a fear of fear itself.” For the most part, though, the duo’s English-language debut finds emotional resonance in even its smallest details, such as a 2-year-old fast asleep despite the thunder of bombs outside his door or a starving teenager relishing her first piece of spearmint gum. Although the Franz and Camillo chapters push the narrative forward, Mathilde is the novel’s emotional core—a multifaceted woman who’s all too aware that her “dread over what Franz had done” casts a shadow over her choices.
A complex, compassionate novel about Germans coming to terms with their actions during WWII.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1937506803
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Rockstar Publishing House
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
