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
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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