A historically astute tale with deep emotional impact.
An engineer working for an illicit labor union risks his life to secure their funds in Lagodzki’s novel.
In 1982, Antoni Adamczyk (he prefers to go by Antek) is an engineer in Frombork, Poland, living under martial law imposed by the Soviet Union. He works for the local union chapter of Solidarity—a group that opposes the Soviet occupation—as its treasurer, in charge of the $20,000 he’s securely hidden in Zygmuntowo. When he runs afoul of the authorities, he is imprisoned, though the money remains safe. Antek is given a fraught chance at freedom—he declares that this is all he really wants for himself and his future children—by Roman Stelmach, a major in the Bezpieka, the secret police. Roman allows Antek to escape so he will lead him to the money, a sum that will allow Roman to begin his life afresh in Rio de Janeiro. In this riveting tale, sleepy Zygmuntowo is the stage for an anxious, gathering intrigue—there, a telephone operator, Emilia Sokołowska, finds herself entrusted with the money and suddenly becomes a potential target of Roman and his henchmen as well. Emilia is an extraordinary character, an artfully drawn symbol of Poland’s humiliation under Soviet despotism—she is reduced to spying on the phone calls of others, cataloging their “sin, love, and banality” and reporting them to the police. She falls in love with her best friend, Kalina, who is being repeatedly raped by her father, Pan Zalewski. Emilia hatches a plan to exact revenge upon Pan called Operation Pig, which is to be executed with another of her closest friends, Agata, also the victim of his sexual abuse. Emilia’s mother is a Communist Party functionary, and as a result she enjoys a certain measure of protection from the authorities, but Emilia is finally drawn into a predicament that her mother will not be able to extricate her from.
Lagodzki’s depiction of Poland’s plight is both subtle and luridly vivid; every significant character, including Roman (ostensibly an enforcer of tyranny), longs to be delivered into liberty. Roman might be the novel’s most complex character. In his youth, he planned on becoming an architect, but once his girlfriend, Bernadeta, became pregnant, he was compelled to drop out of school and find work with the Bezpieka; he’s an ordinary man endowed with an opportunistic nihilism. Emilia is a tantalizingly rich character as well, a moving example of the ways in which totalitarianism makes a private life distinct from political reality simply impossible. While the novel is politically savvy, the two main plots are essentially affecting love stories—the love of Emilia for Kalina and of Antek for his wife, Dorota. Here, the author captures the tender shock of electricity Kalina catalyzes in Emilia’s heart, setting off a conflagration of ungovernable emotion: “Did the desire to kiss Kalina make her a freak? As if the missed masses and holy communions had accumulated to mount a set of devil’s horns on her forehead. Horns or not, if she had any money, she would have given all of it to Kalina just to see her smile.” Lagodzki’s prose is as powerful as his plot is gripping.
A historically astute tale with deep emotional impact.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9798888192061
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Milford House Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
