Novelist and historian Pye (Maximum City, The Biography of New York, 1992, etc.) transforms the life of a historical 17th-century Dutch woman into a novel of you-are-there realism, though of a more strained psychology. Gretje Reyniers, born in 1612, loses her father (to soldiering) and her mother (to a highway accident), finding herself orphaned at the age of 12. From there on, life goes fast. Gretje's job as housemaid to a pewter-maker's family ends when the house burns down and Gretje is blamed: whereafter she drifts into begging, prostitution, marriage to the unappealing Hendrick, and passionate love with the sailor known as Anthony the Turk— including pregnancy by same, and the giving up of daughter Anneke, immediately after birth, to an institution. Leaving Hendrick (``she knew she had to run'') and in search of the elusive Anthony, Gretje sails to New Amsterdam, her reputation as social nonconformist and sexual wanton coming with her. Living with Anthony in the raw New World, Gretje raises more than eyebrows by continuing to sell her personal services (she and Anthony are banished from Manhattan for a time, forging a life instead in the wilderness of Long Island); and yet at the same time gaining wealth by skillfully acquiring property and goods. Decades pass, however, and trouble strikes: Anthony dies in a relentlessly frozen winter; a mysteriously threatening guest arrives; and Gretje, in dark-of-night verbal duels with this mystery-person that sound as much like family- crisis melodrama as they do of their period, Gretje is forced to justify her life as she gives the retelling of it that makes up most of the novel. Dramatically strained notes aside, though, the life, detail, and texture of the time, on both sides of the Atlantic, are alluring, abundant, and vivid: from a scene of childbirth in Holland, or a whale-hunt by Indian canoe, to the ``line of timbers in the mud'' that make up New Amsterdam's ``town wall.''
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-86598-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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