An evocative, engrossing depiction of the devastating choices and consequences of the World War II era.
A Prussian farming family cooperates with Reich control before experiencing traumatic displacement as refugees in Wells’ historical novel.
In June of 1937, Josef Haupt, a father of eight children and a farmer on the outskirts of Guttstadt in East Prussia, travels to town with eldest daughter, Margarete, who is 9 years old. Josef asks a merchant, Aaron Katz, why he is sweeping the town’s streets. Josef’s questioning of this treatment of a Jew leads to his apprehension by the Gestapo. Josef avoids being sent to a labor camp through the intervention of the town’s mayor, Bürgermeister Renkel, who has been pestering Josef to take the role of Ortsbauernführer, a position that will require him to organize and lead the farming community in the area. Josef realizes that he must now accept this assignment to avoid a worse fate, and the family receives a Nazi flag to fly and Polish POWs to work on their farm. As the war years go by, Josef’s four sons are drafted to fight for the Reich. Margarete attends a finishing school in another city but is forced to return when bombing starts as the tide turns against the Reich. Josef dithers, reluctant to flee the farm despite his cynical, wounded son Paul’s urging to escape. The family eventually does leave and is forced to contend with rapes, beatings, stints in refugee camps, and, for Josef, joining the Nazi’s desperate, last-ditch citizens militia initiative as he turns 60. The novel concludes in 1950, with some members of the Haupt family forever lost but others moving on to radically changed new lives.
The author notes in a preface that she originally intended to write a coming-of-age novel about her mother then expanded her focus upon discovering that her grandfather, originally an opponent of Nazism, had been an Ortsbauernführer. The resulting narrative is a sweeping family saga dramatizing the horrible decisions, dilemmas, and tragedies those living under Nazi rule faced. The book is full of striking scenes and heartbreaking images, including Jewish headstones ripped from graveyards to pave the broken roads of Guttstadt, and Margarete discovering the mutilated corpse of a classmate by spotting “a familiar-looking red coat with large black buttons in a heap on the snow.” Wells also effectively probes the psychology of her characters, from Josef’s guilt (“He was too terrified, too selfish to bless an old friend and too much of a coward to practice his religion. And if put in a similar situation the next day, he would act no differently”) to Margarete’s repression of her trauma (“Just as she was an observer of tragedy befalling others, she had become an observer of her own life. It was the only way to protect her soul and her mind. It was the only way to continue to live”). The story is ambitious in scope and at times overwhelming in its details. Overall, however, Wells skillfully weaves together her many plot threads to convey the seismic impact the war had on one family as it reshaped the world.
An evocative, engrossing depiction of the devastating choices and consequences of the World War II era.Pub Date: April 13, 2023
ISBN: 9798987987322
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Posit Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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