A heart-wrenching tale of children trying their utmost to take care of each other.
A Christmas story about a 10-year-old Norwegian girl who believes in miracles, and her 16-year-old sister.
“Hello, two motherless children and an alcoholic here, can you please give us two more weeks?” This is the phone call that Melissa resorted to just once, according to her little sister, Ronja. It’s the full truth, which the sisters try to keep hidden—from the neighbors, from the schools, and even from themselves. The story focuses on one Christmas season when, ever so briefly, their father dries out and gets a job as a Christmas tree seller before once again falling apart. As he disappears into bars, Melissa takes over his job, doing the work before and after school, but for less pay. Soon, her coworker Tommy brings Ronja in to convince customers to buy decorative wreaths so he and the girls can split the commission. She hawks them, saying that “all proceeds go to children in need!”—that is, she and her sister and Tommy’s soon-to-be-born child. But Ronja is too young to be working at the tree market, so her efforts must be kept secret from the owner. Though the sisters love their father, he’s unable to care for them and regularly put food in the fridge, so they’re desperate. But as much as they hope no one sees their situation, everyone does—and just a scant few try to help: There’s Aronsen, the across-the-hallway neighbor who feeds Ronja a few meals and irons her Christmas costume. The caretaker at school who shares his lunch with Ronja every day. Ronja’s friend Musse and his dad, who find her wandering in the cold and try to get her sister to take her to the emergency room. Ronja is convinced that when things are at their worst, a miracle can happen, because sometimes they just do. But then again, sometimes they don’t.
A heart-wrenching tale of children trying their utmost to take care of each other.Pub Date: tomorrow
ISBN: 9780802163493
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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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