A different sort of storyteller, English novelist Binding shifts from the macabre world of hangings in A Perfect Execution (1996) to the furtive hazards of collaboration among Britain’s Guernsey Islanders under Nazi occupation. For them, the horrors of war are muted, allowing an intensely personal tale of romance, duty, and murder to emerge. Life on Guernsey is certainly different after the Germans arrive, but for all the added gun emplacements, gangs of gaunt foreign laborers, short food rations, and jackbooted troops, it’s still possible for two men to be in love with the same woman. Ned Luscombe loved Isobel first, before the war, and she reciprocated even though the chasm of class yawned wide between them. By the time the highly cultured, sensitive Major Lentsch arrives to command the occupation force, however, the ardor between Ned and Isobel has cooled, and as the new head of the island police force Ned can only look on as she takes up with his boss. But then Isobel is murdered, and the two rivals are required to join forces in a painful investigation. Along the way, they become unlikely yet fast friends, though ongoing events keep them from making much headway: Isobel’s father, the architect of the island’s metamorphosis into a fortress, disappears; a thriving black market involving soldiers and civilians comes to light; Ned’s lover before Isobel, Veronica, having already become the daylight mistress of the island’s Gestapo chief, secretly harbors one of the starving laborers—a boy with the only direct knowledge about who killed Isobel. Churning just below all this, in the witches’ brew that Guernsey has become, is the resentment of loyal British citizens who—ve been too long repressed, and a plot that will mean death for every islander should it be carried out. Credible and extraordinarily revealing: all that we are as humans, good and bad, finds embodiment on this tiny island in the midst of war.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7867-0657-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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