There’s no doubt about Behrens’ talent, but the tragic romance at the novel’s center doesn't equal the power of his sobering...
Behrens (The O’Briens, 2011, etc.) again casts his searching eye over the interaction of history and personal destiny, following two families from Edwardian England to Nazi Germany.
Billy Lange and Karin Weinbrenner are born a year apart on the Isle of Wight, at the summer home maintained year-round by Billy’s parents for Karin’s wealthy German-Jewish father. This accident of geography gives Billy and Karin British passports and a means of escape when, three decades later, they are lovers in Germany watching with horrified disbelief as the Nazis make racist street violence an everyday event. Billy’s narrative of that grim year, 1938, begins immediately following his account of his birth and alternates with the chronicle of his deepening relationship with Karin as the two grow up. Their idyllic childhood is shattered by World War I. Billy’s father, the son of a German sea captain, is arrested as a spy and interned, then deported in 1919. Behrens quietly makes the point that brutality and xenophobia are regrettably universal human traits, though their manifestation in Nazi thugs is more apocalyptic than the routine cruelty of British bureaucrats. Baron von Weinbrenner, his Isle of Wight residence now confiscated, provides refuge and employment for the Langes at his estate outside Frankfurt. Behrens’ sensitive insights into the human heart are evident in his characterizations. The baron, an old-school patriot who insists to the end that “Germany was his country, not [the Nazis’],” is particularly poignant, but Billy’s stinging self-portrait of an honorable man not quite brave enough to raise his voice against the growing madness is also powerful and disturbing. Regrettably, free-spirited Karin is more schematic, as is the uninteresting obsession with the Winnetou novels of Karl May that takes her and Billy to wintry New Mexico for a denouement that feels overly staged, though unquestionably sad.
There’s no doubt about Behrens’ talent, but the tragic romance at the novel’s center doesn't equal the power of his sobering meditations on the fragility of human decency.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87049-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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