bookshelf

A BRIDGE ACROSS THE OCEAN

Name: A BRIDGE ACROSS THE OCEAN
Author: Susan Meissner
ISBN: 978-0-451-47600-5

by Susan Meissner ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 14, 2017

An interesting World War II narrative is dragged down by a less-engaging present-day story.

bookshelf

A woman who can see ghosts becomes tangled in a mystery involving European war brides who crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary.

Brette has had the sight since she was a little girl. The ability to see the dead runs in her family, but ever since an aunt told her she was better off ignoring the ghosts she encounters, that’s exactly what she’s done. That is, until an old classmate needs her help and Brette inadvertently becomes drawn into the lives of three women from the past. As Brette communicates with a spirit and tries to unravel the mystery behind one of the ship’s tragedies, Meissner (Secrets of a Charmed Life, 2015, etc.) also tells the stories of two of the ship’s passengers: Annaliese Lange, who is escaping from a marriage to a Nazi, and Simone Devereux, who lost her family in the war. Annaliese's and Simone’s stories are engaging and heartbreaking; Brette’s point of view, though, is less interesting and never seems as urgent. Also, the multiple points of view are occasionally hard to keep track of, especially when it isn’t yet clear how they intersect. Although the stories of Annaliese and Simone are captivating and well-researched, readers may find themselves wishing Meissner had devoted more of the book to the women on the ship and less to Brette and her ability to see ghosts.

An interesting World War II narrative is dragged down by a less-engaging present-day story.

Pub Date: March 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-451-47600-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Berkley

Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST YEAR OF THE WAR
by Susan Meissner

- BOOK REVIEW
AS BRIGHT AS HEAVEN
by Susan Meissner

- BOOK REVIEW
STARS OVER SUNSET BOULEVARD
by Susan Meissner

bookshelf

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Film Productions Halted Due to Coronavirus Worry

- SEEN & HEARD
‘The Nightingale’ Is Reese’s Book Club Pick

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.