A bit much, truth be told, what with all those swelling emotions, soldierly love letters, and lyrical quotes from WWII’s...
Unabashedly romantic fiction from the author of Dance a Little Longer (1993), this time about a small-town enchantress and her swains, circa 1944.
The few men and boys in Cold Springs, Texas, who haven’t been drafted are madly in love with Grace Gillian, but they all prefer to admire her sensual, careless beauty from a safe distance. Even John Appleby, a handsome widower with whom she shared a night of blissful passion, now keeps her at arm’s length. Grace can’t understand it any more than she can understand why her husband, Bucy, abandoned her without a word of explanation. Everyone seems to think she’s just too different somehow. Why, she painted her house an outrageous shade of turquoise, and she’s forever quoting poetry to the dazzled teenagers in her English class—that’s enough to arouse suspicion right there. Young Bobby Moore has a conspicuous crush on her, and so does his respectable father, not that Robert Moore IV would ever admit it to his wife, a free spirit in her own right and a Yankee to boot. Crisscrossing subplots emerge here, involving Bobby’s unrequited love for the girl next door and his father’s callous disregard for the family’s much-loved black maid, who can’t afford the surgery she needs. Grace is too preoccupied by her feelings for John to notice much of this; she’s annoyed by his standoffishness and his sudden decision to join the Army. On impulse, she takes the train to New York to find her errant husband and meets a dashing military man en route. Smitten Sgt. Dan Manning vows to return for Grace by war’s end. Shortly thereafter, Bucy agrees to a divorce. But here’s the quandary: John Appleby corresponds faithfully, but his dispassionate, careful tone irks Grace. Looks like Dan’s her man, but will he survive to make her his?
A bit much, truth be told, what with all those swelling emotions, soldierly love letters, and lyrical quotes from WWII’s greatest hits.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-525-94602-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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