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
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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