A palatable historical novel that holds the nostalgia.
Seattle novelist Morgan’s (Deeper Waters, 2002, etc.) folksy history lesson revisits a small Welsh town 20 years after the Americans ran through in WWII.
It’s 1968, the Vietnam War rages, and young American Tim Bruce sets off on his Grand Tour of Europe after graduating from Berkeley. Hoping to dodge the draft, and having overheard his pompous law-professor father, Carlton, mention the Welsh town of Clarrach, where he once knew a beautiful girl named Gwyneth Griffiths, Tim decides to head there first (“Maybe he’d discover something about his father he didn’t know already”). And, sure enough, there does exist such a lady near the cliff-town of Clarrach, on the west coast of Wales, the respectable wife to Dr. Rhys Edwards. They welcome the naive American, who has been accepted to Harvard Medical School though he’s not sure he wants to become a doctor. Rhys, a Welsh nationalist who makes no attempt to hide his scorn of what he considers the failed experiment of American democracy, mentions, in a cruel aside, the death of Tim’s political hero Robert Kennedy, then later takes him on rounds to let him see what real doctors do. The past story of Gwyneth and Carlton’s relationship gradually, painfully unfolds, involving a baby born out of wedlock and a gruesome beating-murder of a black GI by his racist fellow soldiers jealous of then-teenaged Gwyneth’s attentions. All the while, naturally, Tim falls wildly in love with the alluring, elusive Gwyneth, and their attraction nicely sparks Oedipal electricity. English-born author Morgan deftly incorporates some forbidden history of the American presence in the country during WWII—“Overpaid, oversexed, and over here”—and she clearly relishes Welsh history and culture. After the initial heavy-handed plotting (clumsy Tim keeps hurting himself so that he has to stay with the Edwardses), Morgan conveys a story that seems to strain on its own to be heard.
A palatable historical novel that holds the nostalgia.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-34135-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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