Alternately vivid and research-heavy, a curious tribute to a wartime parable of friendship and connection.
Two lonely souls in a remote corner of England bond over an injured white goose during World War II.
Freda is 12 in 1939, living in the East End of London when war begins, soon becoming one of the many children evacuated from the danger zone of the city to somewhere less likely to be bombed. In Freda’s case, it’s the Fens, a flat landscape of sea and marsh, where she is billeted with Mr. and Mrs. Willock on a sad, muddy farm where she will endure an isolated existence of work, not much food, and the sexual abuse of the farmer. Belonging to a different class, Philip Rhayader, the son of a World War I hero, attends prep school and then Oxford University but is mentally fragile, suffers a breakdown, and declares himself a conscientious objector. He too ends up in the Fens, living in an abandoned lighthouse, finding peace in isolation and agricultural labor, relishing the natural world and the wide landscape that engenders his urge to paint. British author Hubbard’s novel derives from Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose, a famous 1940s novella set in Essex, which Hubbard has returned to Lincolnshire, the location of the lighthouse that inspired Gallico's story. Heavily descriptive, the book works hard to evoke place, time, and mood, sometimes repetitively, and can become bogged down in nostalgic minutiae; at other times it successfully evokes the aching beauty of the bleak, watery landscape alive with bird life. Narrated by Freda in her old age, the story reveals how she and Philip meet over an injured albino goose which they name Fritha, a name Freda adopts, too. The story’s climax arrives at a peak of chaos and danger for both characters, as the horrific events of the Dunkirk beaches chime with Freda’s extremis and acknowledgment of Philip’s legacy.
Alternately vivid and research-heavy, a curious tribute to a wartime parable of friendship and connection.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781911590743
Page Count: 269
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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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