Halter fleshes out the scriptural account with rich and credible portraits of contemporary life and history, even if his...
The prizewinning French author re-creates the story of Abraham and Sarah and the unlikely steps that led to their giving birth to both Judaism and the Jewish people.
We know that Abraham was the patriarch whose descendants were to be as numerous as the sands on the shore—despite the fact that his wife Sarah made it well into her 80s without bearing a child. Halter (Stories of Deliverance, 1997, etc.) follows the biblical line pretty closely, but he fills in a lot of detail that Moses never wrote down. We learn, for example, that Sarah is the daughter of a nobleman in Ur, in ancient Sumer, and that she is betrothed to a Sumerian prince. At the last minute, however, she rebels against her fate by refusing the marriage and running away. Hiding in the swamps outside the city, she stumbles upon a young man named Abram fishing for crayfish in the glades—and spends the night with him. Abram is a nomad, one of the mar.Tu people whose encampments encircle the city. Later on, Sarah returns to face the music at home but guarantees that she will never have to go through with the marriage by taking a potion that renders her infertile. Now unmarriageable, she becomes a priestess of the goddess Ishtar and presides over the sacred rites (especially the slaughter of bulls) in the temple. Years later, however, she meets Abram by chance and discovers that she is still in love with him. You know the rest: Abram and Sarah run off together and start a new race with the eventual and miraculous birth of their son Isaac, and the world is never the same again.
Halter fleshes out the scriptural account with rich and credible portraits of contemporary life and history, even if his narration (“There was a quivering in her belly that had nothing to do with fear or anger”) occasionally descends to the level of the bodice-buster.Pub Date: May 4, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-5272-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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