An enjoyable read with a strong protagonist and a trove of historical nuggets.
A historical novel follows the early life of an Irish girl who immigrates with her family to New York City.
In 1889, 7-year-old Rose O’Brien travels to Dublin and steps aboard the Furnessia steamship, bound for a future that promises new opportunities. Her father, Charles, has already made the trip, and now she, her mother, and her three younger brothers are about to join him in New York. Charles meets them at the Castle Garden immigration center—Ellis Island will not open until 1892—and brings them to a Manhattan tenement apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. The family rejoices in the reunion, and Rose begins to make friends with the ethnically and nationally diverse immigrant kids in the area. (Her “building was filled with children of all ages….They tumbled down the stairs and sat on the stoop.”) Rose meets young Anthony Vigliano, who lives in her building and will become pivotal in her life. Then, just a few months after the O’Briens’ arrival, the “Russian Flu” brings tragedy to the family when Rose’s mother succumbs to the raging virus. Fortunately, Jenny Himmelfarb, a woman working with the outreach program run by the Neighborhood Guild, comes into their lives and arranges for Rose and her eldest brother, Maurice, to register for public school. Himmelfarb’s continued involvement with the family opens the door to the children’s integration into American life. McCann’s gentle novel is narrated by Rose in a charming and optimistic voice supporting women’s equality that carries a tinge of Hallmark gloss in the descriptions of the opportunities offered and successes achieved by the immigrant kids in her circle. The narrative moves pleasantly and episodically through a decade and a half of Rose’s growth into womanhood. Although light in significant dramatic tension, the tale richly overflows with everyday details of turn-of-the-20th-century life in New York, including the social and political movements of the period. And despite Rose’s commitment to becoming a nurse—which, according to the standards of the day, means remaining single and chaste—her budding romance with Anthony keeps the story intriguing.
An enjoyable read with a strong protagonist and a trove of historical nuggets.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2022
ISBN: 9780578273464
Page Count: 482
Publisher: Hazel Wand Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2022
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
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
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