A pleasant coming-of-age tale with well-developed main characters.
A young Canadian woman in the 1920s learns about herself as she gets her first job in Williams’ historical novel.
In 1927 Vancouver, 17-year-old Clara Wilson, who’s still mourning the death of her mother five years prior, finds out quite suddenly that she, her father, and her slightly older sister, Louisa, are about to be evicted. She decides to go apply for a job at the Hotel Hamilton, a luxury hotel set to open the next month, and Louisa tags along against Clara’s wishes. As Clara fills out an application, she meets a spoiled young woman named Jane Morgan. All three young women make it through the application process to train to be maids. It turns out that snobbish Jane turned down the suitor that her parents picked for her, so she’s working in order to avoid being shipped off to England to live with an elderly relative. Clara sympathizes, but Jane’s privilege and laziness get on her nerves and nearly sabotage a test they must pass together. Clara’s afraid to complain to those in charge, as Jane’s uncle knows the hotel’s owner. However, when Jane shifts blame for her own mistakes onto Clara, the latter panics and acts in ways that may cost her the job she so desperately wants. The sisters also must deal with their father’s heavy drinking and unemployment and have only a month to cover their outstanding rent. Williams’ depiction of the complexity of the often tense relationship between the sisters is the highlight of the novel as a whole. Clara’s interactions with Louisa, an aspiring actress, are frequently fraught, as Clara feels obligated to watch out for her sibling but is jealous of her beauty and her seeming ease with navigating the world around her. They frequently antagonize each other but also help each other out. There are some nice period details throughout the novel, too, including bits of 1920s slang and headlines about Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight in the Spirit of St. Louis. The story can be slow in spots, bogged down by unnecessary detail, but it has a satisfying ending.
A pleasant coming-of-age tale with well-developed main characters.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-989144-16-9
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Rippling Effects
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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