A rich and moving saga of bravery both at home and in the face of battle.
The saga of an Australian family set against the high-stakes backdrop of World War II.
In this second installment of Schroller’s Immense Sky Saga, Australian couple Joe and Sophie Parker are freshly back in Sydney, Australia. Their “honeymoon” trip throughout Europe included bringing back Sophie’s aging mother Lily and a young French woman, Marianne, who serves as Lily’s companion and harbors dreams of making a name for herself as a seamstress and fashion designer. Readers meet Joe and Sophie’s boys Jean-Luc and Sam. Jean-Luc runs a winery, and Sam is an experienced pilot. As a love triangle begins developing between Sam, Marianne, and Isobel (another young woman with designs on Sam), the family’s fears about the growing threat of Nazi Germany are soon affirmed when England (a close Australian ally) declares war on Germany after the Nazis invade Poland. While Sam and Jean-Luc are ready and—perhaps only in Sam’s case—excited to fight for freedom from tyranny, Joe and Sophie are haunted by their all-too-recent memories of the horrors of World War I, in which Joe was a commissioned officer and Sophie served as a nurse in Paris. As war envelops the globe, Sophie and Marianne must remain stalwart on the home front, hoping and praying for the chance to someday live out their lives with the men they love intact. Readers of the first novel in this series will be unsurprised to find a deep well of research and authority from which Schroller draws here, along with no small amount of pastoral prose, as seen in Marianne’s letter home describing her first flight with Sam: “I had already spied Sophie and Joe’s house. I could see a tiny figure at the back of the property. It must have been Mrs. Kelly… she always feeds the chickens and gathers eggs before she and her husband Thomas go to mass.” Though World War II novels are commonplace, Schroller has managed to write an affecting tale with memorable characters that stands out from the crowd.
A rich and moving saga of bravery both at home and in the face of battle.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9798985261639
Page Count: 430
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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