A risky, provocative novel with some exceptional writing.
An elderly German tells his grandson about his World War II experiences on the Eastern Front in this flawed but thoughtful work.
Hitler’s disastrous invasion of the Soviet Union led to the deaths of millions of soldiers and civilians. Starritt views the war through the eyes of elderly survivor Meissner, a German artillery soldier. His memories of those days, his thoughts about guilt and shame, have been reawakened by questions from his grandson, Callum, who grew up in Scotland but feels “an odd sensation of connectedness” to Germany and a shame that “has gathered, like a mulchy spot on an apple.” In a long letter to Callum occasionally interrupted by the younger man’s comments, Meissner says he wants to explain something about his war. “I can’t quite articulate it myself,” he says, but “it’s to do with courage.” In autumn 1944, after fighting and retreating in Russia and Ukraine, he's in Poland, near the German border. Meissner and four others get separated from their unit after being ordered to go looking for a rumored food depot. They see Polish villagers hung by unidentified men from a single tree “in bunches, like swollen plums.” They kill German soldiers guarding the food depot (the rumors were true) who refuse to share. When they later see other German troops rape and crucify women, Meissner wonders if it's in retaliation for his group's action against the food depot. They steal a tank and use it against the Russians. These episodes are well drawn; the brief time inside the tank is a small masterpiece. But it’s not entirely clear where courage comes in as Meissner’s theme despite a few brave actions. Elsewhere he struggles to define his views on the Holocaust. He stresses that he didn’t see the camps and doesn’t feel any collective guilt. “What I do feel, ineradicably, is shame.” That at least is clear, the legacy of shame. It hasn’t diminished for an old man many years after the war’s end, and it remains inescapable for his grandson born in the 1980s in a different country. Starritt himself shows courage in his approach to one facet of the war’s legacy and may offer solace to Germans like Callum who also suffer from their “connectedness” and to those close to them.
A risky, provocative novel with some exceptional writing.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-31642-980-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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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