Rousing historical fiction with a feminist bent.
In Andrews’ historical novel, an American journalist faces misogyny as she travels to cover American soldiers fighting in the Great War.
Alice Simmons, a young reporter from St. Paul, Minnesota, follows her mentor Ira Cunningham to Paris to write about the ongoing war in 1918. (The novel’s action takes place over the course of that year’s summer, when United States troops began to arrive in Europe.) As a female journalist, Alice is repeatedly blocked from covering serious matters, while her male colleagues are able to leave Paris and report from the front lines. After she fights off an assault by her commanding officers, Major Richard Martel and Captain Ralph Buck, Ira convinces her to join his daughter Trudy (who is Alice’s childhood best friend) as a nurse in the hospital. While she has always aspired to be a reporter, Alice was convinced to go to school for nursing as a backup career option; she excelled, partly due to her parents’ medical careers and the access that came with them. At the hospital, Alice faces more roadblocks when she discovers her credentials will need to be sent for before she can fully enlist as an army nurse—she must work as an aide until they arrive. The head nurse Marion Pickler has a strong prejudice against aides, and, regardless of the fact that Alice is actually a nurse, is harsh and abusive toward her, along with the other aides (“Well, I can’t keep you out of this hospital, but you’re not welcome here”). Alice’s standing becomes even more dire when Martel and Buck take revenge by accusing her of espionage. In spite of everything, Alice cheerfully tends to the wounded soldiers in her care. Andrews writes the two narrators’ voices distinctively, making it easy to tell whether it’s the young, passionate, and optimistic Alice or the hardened and pessimistic (yet still idealistic) Ira who is speaking. Though most characters in the novel are men, Alice has plenty of her own agency and tends to save herself rather than wait for someone to save her, making her an engaging and powerful character. Fans of inspiring war narratives will find much to love in this novel.
Rousing historical fiction with a feminist bent.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2023
ISBN: 9798989383559
Page Count: 326
Publisher: 46 North Publications
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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