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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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