For readers who enjoy swoony romance with a dash of history.
A group of assorted characters who for one reason or another never made it into their assigned berths on the Titanic form surprising bonds in Schaffert’s lush latest.
A year after the sinking of the Titanic, despondent young Yorick, who has used an inheritance to purchase an antiquarian bookshop in Paris from which he sells remarkably few volumes, receives a mysterious invitation to a party with 10 other “survivors” of the disaster, including a famous actress, a mystery writer, and a toymaker, who assembled the group so they could share their stories. Yorick is particularly beguiled by Haze, a young man he sums up as “a yawn, and a stretch, and a flutter of long, ladylike eyelashes,” and intrigued by Zinnia, the Japanese American daughter of a candy magnate. Though, at Zinnia’s suggestion, the members of the group continue to assemble periodically to discuss controversial books, the plot primarily revolves around one romantic triangle: Yorick pines for Haze, who worships Zinnia, who longs for a romance with Yorick. A twist on Cyrano de Bergerac is added when Haze convinces Yorick to write love letters in his name to Zinnia. Schaffert has a much stronger gift for atmosphere than plot: He relies on the incursion of World War I, during which Haze serves as a freelance photographer, Yorick is commissioned to work as a censor, and Zinnia takes the reins of the candy company, to break the static triangle and then, postwar, wraps up the story hastily. The novel is at its best in evoking the sumptuous details of prewar life in Paris: a bookstore brought to new life by infusions of Zinnia’s cash and taste, a night at the opera where the spectators spend as much time looking at each other as listening to the music, the secret club that feels like being “inside the Chinese box where Dorian Gray kept his opium—the black and gold-dust lacquer, the patterns of curved waves, the silk, the crystal, the plaited metal threads.”
For readers who enjoy swoony romance with a dash of history.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780385549158
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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