An absorbing and powerful story showing the pointlessness of war.
A boy searches for his sister near the end of the Trojan War.
Eleven-year-old Hani wonders if he is the last person on Earth. His family and neighbors have recently disappeared, either killed or dragged away to serve in the war. For as long as Hani has lived, war has raged. Now alone, he survives by killing and roasting frogs. A gentle soul, he doesn’t like killing harmless creatures, but he needs to eat. He feels a special bond with his 6-year-old sister, Arinna, and they share a secret language. Arinna used to sing them both to sleep with songs that she’d heard from the gods, the songs that would protect children from danger, and now she is gone. He sets out on a journey to find her and bring her home. He believes he is not brave, so his mission calls for “loyalty and pluck.” While the setting is not explicitly named, the details—such as bronze daggers, cubit measurements, and the remnants of a wooden horse—firmly situate the tale in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Hani travels with his loyal donkey, Ansa, a source of comfort and wisdom. He does wonder if the thousand or more gods on Mount Hazzi are real; if they were, “why would they destroy the world, then choose him, Hani, the most ignorant person alive, to be the only survivor?” He comes to a burned-out city with its “twisty tangle of human corpses,” almost every one of them an old person. This war has been explained to him his whole life, but he still knows nothing. However, he believes in fate, which even the gods are powerless to stop. His own fate is to search for Arinna. Meanwhile, the first sign he sees of life is a dying soldier who opens his eyes. Is he an invader from across the seas, or is he a defender? Hani doesn’t know, but he has three choices: He can kill the man, walk away and let him die, or try to slake the poor man’s thirst. His decision guides the rest of the plot in this remarkable post-Iliad adventure. Although admittedly ignorant, Hani wisely muses that “love is what holds the world together; even a child knows it, a donkey knows it, a trapped frog knows it.” And perhaps more ominously, “Maybe peace is just war taking a rest.” But he loves “when the first stars appear, rising freshly washed and sparkling from the sea.”
An absorbing and powerful story showing the pointlessness of war.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316581233
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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