A delightful heroine jumps into the past in order to embrace her future.
In this magic-tinged novel, time travel to the Prohibition era gives a grieving woman a way to change her life and save her family.
Following the death of her husband, 35-year-old Josephine Reynolds is wallowing in grief and wishing she could just disappear. Months later, she’s still unable to move forward, until her sister encourages her to buy their ancestral Nashville home. Josephine has big plans for renovating the house, including finding the perfect replacement for the shabby front door. She’s flabbergasted when the door she finds at a local salvage yard turns out to be the house’s original entryway, and, incredibly, it’s a doorway into the past. How is it possible that when Josephine uses the original key, she steps into the Jazz Age? It’s 1927, and Josephine quickly realizes what’s at stake. When she returns to the present, an internet search reveals that her great-grandmother Alma died during a raid on her basement speakeasy that year—and that she had no children at the time of her death. But if that’s what happened, how did Josephine’s grandmother and mother—and Josephine herself—come to be born? Josephine takes on the daunting task of stopping Alma’s death so her family can exist. Meanwhile, in the present, her possessions begin to disappear as if they and she are already being erased from the world. Fans of time travel will love this imaginative, high-stakes novel, as will fans of The Great Gatsby, thanks to the vivid descriptions of the Jazz Age, its parties, music, and dancing, and the way women were fighting for their rights and potential. Part fantasy, part romance, part coming-of-age story, this sweetly told tale of a woman’s search for her true self is imbued with Moorman’s trademark touch of magic.
A delightful heroine jumps into the past in order to embrace her future.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781400343638
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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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