An intriguing but slow-paced love story.
A Catalonian man of inauspicious origins struggles to become a successful baker during politically tumultuous times in this early-20th-century epic novel based on a true story.
Martí Cardo is born and raised in Igualada, a city in Catalonia, by a family of modest means; his father, Hector, is a poor, illiterate farmer. Martí suffers from no poverty of ambition, though, and pines to emulate his older brother, Oscar, who owns a prosperous bakery business in Mexico City. After his father dies suddenly, Martí opens a bakery under the lovingly avuncular tutelage of Ceferino, his godfather. Meanwhile, Martí falls in love with Montserrat “Montse” Balaguer, a beautiful local girl, a gifted artist, and the daughter of prominent, affluent businessman Augustin. While she requites Martí’s affections, Augustin rejects their romance on the predictable grounds that the suitor is an illiterate peasant. Martí eventually wins over Augustin, and the young couple marry. But despite this triumph, the pair’s troubles have only begun. In the first third of the 20th century, Spain is immersed in domestic turbulence, and following the end of King Alfonso’s reign, the country teeters on civil war. To make matters worse, Martí’s long-standing rival for Montse’s affections, Felix Castell, the son of Igualada’s mayor, becomes a powerful officer in the army responsible for tracking down Fascists. When Felix’s lust to destroy the baker turns murderous, Martí and Montse have no choice but to flee the country and start over, hopping on a ship destined for Mexico City.
Lytle’s ambitious story is politically astute, offering many rich details. In addition, the author’s command of the historical period is impressive. While this isn’t a principally political novel—it’s a love story first and foremost—the historical context isn’t negligible, and Lytle lucidly explains the complex internecine conflicts in Spain without burdening readers or distracting them from the central narrative line. But the book is hampered by sentimentality. Consider this line describing the day of Martí and Montse’s betrothal: “Sunlight streamed in through the stained-glass windows high above them, reminding everyone of God’s love, transformed in colorful glass. The light seemed to ignite a flame of joy that lit up Montse’s face.” The tale is related by Nuria, the daughter of Martí and Montse, to well-known Spanish reporter Margarida Cardona, now an older woman. Nuria relates an old-fashioned tale, she insists, but also an unabashedly and endearingly romantic one. Unfortunately, the plot moves at an unhurried pace, unworried that readers’ patience will be tested. Yet the novel’s central problem is the writing, which can be maudlin. A romantic novel hinges on the poetry of its depictions of matters of the heart, and this work is sometimes undermined by the canned emotions of its two protagonists. Martí’s letter here is an example: “Dearest Montse, When I see you, I always feel like Heaven is smiling on me. Now that I am home, I never want us to be apart. I do not think I could bear leaving you again. You give me strength and make me happy beyond words. I hope this day and every day of your life I can give you great joy. I love you.”
An intriguing but slow-paced love story.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2021
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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