A flawed but vibrant and juicy book, good conversation fodder for the politically inclined.
On the Harvard campus in 1969 and the Paris streets in 2018, parallel protagonists become enmeshed in radical politics and romance.
Playwright Silverman’s sophomore novel starts off strong, pursuing two storylines that will of course eventually converge. The earlier of the two, at Harvard, involves an organic chemistry graduate student named Keen who rescues a fleeing protestor from the police, then falls fast and hard for her and her world, though he works in the laboratory of a man Olya and her friends consider a war criminal. The 50-years-later plot revolves around Minnow, 38, an American woman living in France. Devastated after getting caught up in a scandal involving a student’s abortion at the school where she taught, she escapes to Paris, where she, too, connects with a protester on the street, 23-year-old Charles. The rebellious scion of a wealthy man connected to President Emmanuel Macron, Charles is part of the gilet jaune (yellow vest) movement. In both cases, the political conversion experience involves hot sex and stirring scenes of activism (Keen at the Dow Chemical protest is wonderful), but eventually things go horribly wrong. Oddly, this book seems to be in sympathy with the attitudes and frustrations of the movements depicted, but the twin disasters are awful enough to scare an impressionable reader off radicalism altogether, especially because the upshot seems to be that political action can ruin people without changing the world at all. Young Charles says as much: “I think it must be a slow poison to come up against the limitations of justice again and again. The more you see, the more poison accumulates. But what changes in the end is you, not the systems, not the structures. Just you.” (People make a lot of speeches to each other in this book.) In the end, the idea that one generation repeats the mistakes of the last is dramatized a bit too faithfully, and the ending leaves some big questions unanswered.
A flawed but vibrant and juicy book, good conversation fodder for the politically inclined.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780593448359
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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