Smart, skillful entertainment.
A real-life train crash propels Donoghue’s latest work of historical fiction.
It begins on the Normandy coast on Oct. 22, 1895, as Mado Pelletier boards the eponymous train after buying some unspecified “supplies.” Donoghue displays her usual flair for in-depth research with the next scene, when 7-1/2-year-old Maurice Marland is confused by the 5-minute discrepancy between the times on the clocks over the station entrance and on the platform. The station clock is set ahead to prod tardy passengers, the train guard explains. Similar nuggets of train lore throughout—most notably detailed descriptions of the driver’s and stoker’s perfectly synchronized teamwork—add to rather than detract from the Hitchcockian suspense as readers wait for the crash. (It’s a nice touch that, reminiscent of Donoghue’s contemporary novels, the aforesaid driver and stoker, both men, are unspokenly in love.) The author assembles a large cast, many of whom are real-life figures, though some were not actually on the train. Readers won’t care as Donoghue imagines compelling inner lives for her factual and fictional characters. They include ammunitions manufacturer Jules-Félix Gévelot, who has secret proclivities; African American artist Henry Tanner, who finds a kindred spirit in Cuban-descended medical student Marcelle de Heredia, also the subject of prejudice; and Alice Guy, secretary to the head of Gaumont and Co., who battles sexism to convince her clueless boss there’s a future in moving pictures. About a third of the way through the trip, we learn that Mado, an anarchist, carries a bomb to blow up the train; her principal targets are deputies on their way to the National Assembly session, but she knows many innocent people will also die, and her private struggle with this knowledge joins other expertly juggled plot lines to render each character a sharply delineated individual. Donoghue doesn’t aspire here to the thematic depth that distinguishes such earlier historical novels as Life Mask (2004); this one’s just for fun.
Smart, skillful entertainment.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668082799
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Summit
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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
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
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