A moving work about the horrors of the Holocaust.
Maysonave and Goldman’s historical novel, based on a true story, offers an account of one woman’s determination to survive the Holocaust.
Although this is a work of fiction, its protagonist, Hinda Mondlak, was Goldman’s mother, and the suffering she endures in these pages is based on actual events in her life. Just before her death in 1985, she recorded recollections of her experiences, which Goldman kept. He was traumatized by her account of the abuses she suffered at the Auschwitz concentration camp in the 1940s, but he came to believe that her story must be told to others. At the heart of his mother’s narration was a promise made by her father, whom she called “Tatae,” that she would survive to bring her family’s tale to others: “You will live; you will tell,” he’d insisted, just before his execution. In fulfilling this promise, Maysonave and Goldman rely heavily on Mondlak’s testimony, but they employ the techniques of fiction to make her story more accessible to readers. The result is effective and often painful in its detail and emotional force. Many readers will admire Hinda’s devotion to her family and her determination to resist her Nazi captors as they attempt to dehumanize her. Her story effectively reflects the larger pattern of the Holocaust, which included the expulsion of Jewish people from communities in occupied Poland, as well as their ghettoization and imprisonment in labor and death camps. This fictionalized account helps readers to see the impact of these events in intimate, devastating ways. As the story shifts to Auschwitz, the authors not only provide searing accounts of systematic abuses and executions but also offer horrific glimpses into the minds and actions of Nazi officers such as Josef Mengele. At other points, readers see how bonds of love between prisoners gave them the will to live and sustained their hopes for liberation and justice. There’s also a remarkable love story at the heart of this novel—a relationship that will surprise and delight readers for its ability to withstand the most terrible of circumstances.
A moving work about the horrors of the Holocaust.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781959096962
Page Count: 550
Publisher: DartFrog Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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