Though it highlights historic advances for women, this book is really about gender discrimination in the home.
In a Massachusetts armory town, four women negotiate the World War II homefront.
Loigman’s second novel portrays a sampling of the women whose roles were pivotal during the wartime manufacturing boom. Lillian is the wife of Patrick, commanding officer of the Springfield Armory. Her family life is happy but always overshadowed by memories of childhood abuse by a cruel, martinet father. Arietta, an Italian-American from a vaudeville background, works as a cook in the local cafeteria, where she also belts out numbers to great acclaim. Millie, a war widow, works in the arms factory. She and her toddler son, Michael, live with her sister, Ruth, who works in payroll and is married to Arthur, a top armory scientist. The novel focuses primarily on Millie and Ruth, bracketing their particular sibling rivalry with the sisterhood of women at war. But Loigman’s main preoccupation, conveyed with unsparing candor in extended flashbacks, is with the drastically disparate treatment, by their parents and everyone around them, of Ruth and Millie. In their 1930s Brooklyn Jewish household, youngest daughter Millie, with her red hair and blue eyes, is compared and judged superior to firstborn Ruth, whose appearance, though not described beyond “straight hair” and “brown eyes,” does not measure up. The pattern continues as the girls mature: Ruth’s academic achievements are discounted, her perfectionism is taken for granted, and her dates are diverted by her sister. Millie, however, seems directionless and confused. Her first serious boyfriend, future husband Lenny, is dubbed “the Bum” by her mother. So desperate is Ruth to escape the eternal comparisons that she marries Arthur and is overjoyed to be relocated to backwater Springfield. The parents’ influence is so far-reaching and invasive that their sudden deaths in a car accident are a necessary authorial expedient to let the plot breathe. The stark, painful depiction of “looks-ism,” 1930s style, undercuts the anodyne message of the novel’s resolution.
Though it highlights historic advances for women, this book is really about gender discrimination in the home.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-14070-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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