One of the great modern sagas, and a thoroughly entrancing exploration of the past.
The 1928 Nobel Prize–winning author returns to the Middle Ages in the first volume of a tetralogy.
Of the important clans of Norway, none was more powerful than the Steinfinnssøns, “the name given to a lineage that flourished in rural districts around Lake Mjøsa during the time when the sons of King Harald Gille reigned in Norway.” A modern reader would be forgiven for not knowing that Harald was the illegitimate son of one Magnus Barefoot, eventually murdered in a vicious civil war by another of Magnus’ “wayside bastards.” So it was with the Steinfinnssøns, a tough bunch who were quick to take up arms. Adopted into the clan as a boy, Olav Audunssøn is betrothed to the clan leader’s daughter Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter, the daughter of a woman who that leader had stolen away from another powerful warlord. The legality of their marriage was therefore always up to challenge, a problem passed on to Olav and Ingunn, since they were sealed when Steinfinn, Ingunn’s father, was staggering drunk. When Olav decides to finalize the arrangement, though, the Steinfinnssøns say that it was all in jest; as an elder tells him, “we now need to bind ourselves through marriage agreements to men who wield power and have powerful kinsmen, neither of which you have.” That repudiation sets tragedy in motion: Olav, having inherited his late father’s battle axe, buries it into a cousin of Ingunn’s, forcing him to take to the outlaw trail. It won’t be the only death on his hands: A later victim will be the father of Ingunn’s child, sired while Olav was on the run. Undset sends abundant signals that, come the next volume, the reunion of Olav and Ingunn won’t be happy. Undset’s novel has been available in English translation for decades, but Nunnally’s new version is fluid and readable in contrast to its predecessor’s rather stilted prose. In all events, the novel is a pleasure to read, elegant and often beautiful despite its morose tone and spasms of violence.
One of the great modern sagas, and a thoroughly entrancing exploration of the past.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5179-1048-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2023
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 dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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