Despite its real historical virtues, this is a dramatically underwhelming novel.
In Bristow’s historical novel, based on a true story, an Italian couple attempts to hide the nation’s artistic treasures from looting Nazis.
In 1943, Sant’ Angelo, a rural town in northern Italy, is plunged into the perilous drama of World War II—the Nazis imperiously take control of the region and plunder the local farmers’ supplies, causing shortages. Meanwhile, fascist groups prowl the countryside looking to forcibly conscript young men into service. Partisan militias form to combat both incursions, ensuring that the area is engulfed in violence. As a result, a “a pall of fear had settled over the village and the surrounding countryside, and no amount of praying seemed to relieve it,” a situation poignantly depicted by the author. Luca Rossi and Elena Marchetti, both of whom hail from prominent farming families in the area, feel the squeeze of the brewing conflicts, and both have brothers who leave home to take their chances with the partisans. Luca wants to contribute to the defense of Italy somehow but is desperately needed by his family on the farm, and Elena feels the same; she’s unwilling to become a soldier, but desperate to do her part: “She was not ready to take up arms to save her country like her brother, but she wasn’t a child. She was tired of being treated as if her life was less important than her brother’s.” An aspiring art curator, she is presented with a novel opportunity to make a difference—Pasquale Rotondi, who works at the Galleria Nazionale in Urbino, is in charge of the effort to hide precious Italian art from Nazi looting, and he asks her to join him. As the Nazis grow closer to discovering the operation, he comes up with a dangerous plan to ship the hidden art, with Elena’s help, to the Vatican in Rome.
Bristow’s recreation of the political tinderbox Italy had become during the war is meticulous—her research is impeccably rigorous. For the typical Italian unencumbered by fascist ideology, the predicament was all but unbearable, a grim circumstance she brings vividly to life. She astutely explores an issue that transcends mere survival: the protection of the nation’s cultural identity. The relationship between Luca and Elena is tenderly drawn; despite the distance that separates them—he is a homebound farmer and she a worldly aesthete—they seem uniquely suitable for each other. However, the prose, always lucid and sometimes dramatically powerful, too often indulges shopworn cliches and facile sentimentality. The book’s conclusion, in particular, is so cloyingly lachrymose it feels baldly manipulative. The reader is constantly lectured on the great importance of art, and often compelled to take in impassioned (if platitudinous) sermons about its value. Consider this proselytizing speech by Paolo, Luca’s father: “Without art, we are just like animals, struggling to survive each day. The churches would just be buildings without the altarpieces that reflect the glory of God. We all need to be inspired.” This banally formulaic defense of art, which runs throughout the entire novel, undermines the book’s literary appeal.
Despite its real historical virtues, this is a dramatically underwhelming novel.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2023
ISBN: 9798988791904
Page Count: 258
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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