A gentle novel of high ideals that never quite comes to life.
Covering six decades, Wachtel’s debut novel about the friendship forged by two Polish Jews who survive the Holocaust together evolves into a story about surviving the many guises of loss.
In 1944 Poland, Jacob Stein, 18, and Zalman Mendelson, 12, meet while hiding from the Nazis in a hay barn. They remain together—Zalman sharing his family’s tragic history, Jacob unable to talk about his past—until the war ends and they emigrate together to America. While Zalman farms in Minnesota, Jacob stays in New York City, where he marries Esther and takes over her job, one she secretly loved, managing her father’s business. Once financially secure, Jacob hires Zalman, whose father trained him in architecture and whose career in Minnesota has conveniently been cut short by an arm injury, to design the dream home Jacob has always fantasized building. Zalman moves into the finished house with Jacob and Esther in a supposedly temporary arrangement that lasts for years. The reader senses early danger signs of the romantic triangle that entangles the three for the rest of their lives. Esther grows dependent on Zalman for platonic companionship as Jacob becomes increasingly introverted. The birth and raising of their son renews Esther and Jacob’s marriage. But then tragedy strikes, causing decades of guilt, grief, and missed connections, almost always handled by those affected with fortitude and reticence. Except for the stereotypical portrayal of some poor White Southerners as cretins, Wachtel writes with a surfeit of affection for her characters, constantly (over-) emphasizing their well-meaning goodness. Although the last scene occurs in 2010 and Wachtel pointedly uses details like home decor and dress styles to demarcate the changing decades, the outside world remains a cardboard backdrop. Ultimately the novel’s focus shifts from the characters to the house that has bound and divided them, repository of their hopes, regrets, and memories.
A gentle novel of high ideals that never quite comes to life.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-6625-0874-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
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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