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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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