Romance blooms in the cold ground of a Russian gulag in this engaging work based on a true story.
In George’s historical novel, a woman survives the horrors of two Nazi concentration camps, only to be sentenced to 10 years in a Soviet gulag where, impossibly, she finds love.
Celia Klein was sent to Auschwitz at 16, and then transferred to another camp, Ravensbruck, in 1945 as Josef Stalin’s Red Army marched against the crumbling Nazi regime. Her Soviet liberators are cruel, but Celia manages to return home to Bardejov, Slovakia, where she finds another family living in her house. Soon, Soviet security operatives, suspicious of the fact that she has few possessions and can speak German, arrest her for being a spy. She ends up in Vorkuta, a gulag in the freezing Ural Mountains. Angry and cynical after witnessing endless brutality in the German camps, Celia becomes a leader to her fellow prisoners and secures a hospital job that keeps her from having to work in deadly coal mines. She also meets prisoner Ivan Kovach, a lawyer known for using Soviet law to get prisoners released. Ivan charms her with stories of prisoner strikes and Russian novels, but she struggles to open herself up to love, and is unable to forgive her teenage self for things she did to survive Auschwitz. George, the pen name of husband-and-wife writing team George Kovach and Julia Odegard, draws on stories of Kovach’s father and stepmother. There’s nothing exploitative in this historical novel, which takes a hard look at postwar antisemitism and the horrific conditions that gulag prisoners faced. The book’s setting is bleak, but it manages to tell an impressively engaging love story with occasional humor, as in a story of an abandoned outhouse. A brief epilogue with photographs follows the challenges that Kovach’s family members faced after Vorkuta (“Starting a new life was difficult. My father and stepmother spent over a year in the country. They were still under surveillance by the secret police”), and it elegantly and firmly places the story in the context of the people who inspired it.
Romance blooms in the cold ground of a Russian gulag in this engaging work based on a true story.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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