An emotionally resonant portrait of the artist as a young woman.
A young woman in 17th-century Amsterdam uncovers her artistic potential in D’Harlingue’s historical novel.
Artist Isaac van Brug embarks upon an African expedition in 1642 with Jan Van Herder to meet with the king of Congo and to visit Mbanza Congo—San Salvador—and the river Kwango to make sketches of the region. He loses his drawings in a storm. To supplement the family’s income, his children, Anneke and her brother, Lucas, learn to color maps at a young age under their mother Lysbeth’s tutelage. While map coloring inspires Lucas to see the world, Anneke becomes immersed in the craft and surpasses her mother’s skill, thus gaining the attention of Heer Meyert, of Joan Blaeu’s printing house. Anneke is invited to work at the printing house and subsequently impresses Joan Blaeu himself when she is commissioned to work at the home of the aristocratic Willem de Groot, where she becomes enmeshed in de Groot’s wife Helena’s adulterous scandal. Longing to create her own map, Anneke works on a representation of her father’s African journey. However, her dreams are not all that she imagined when entrenched family secrets lead to unimagined hardship (“If he had known how it would end, my father would have struck the paintbrush from my young hand”). The author’s emotionally resonant narrative follows the coming-of-age of a female artist fueled by a passion for her work and a deep longing to contribute something of value to the world. D’Harlingue deftly portrays her struggles and the complicated relationship dynamics that emerge as Anneke shares her work with others, ultimately exposing disturbing truths that harm all involved. The book is a convincing depiction of the period, in which women were not celebrated for their artistic accomplishments. Although there are moments when plot machinations seem to overshadow Anneke’s personal story, the novel is impressively researched, well paced, and compelling.
An emotionally resonant portrait of the artist as a young woman.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781647425470
Page Count: 312
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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