A vividly detailed rendering of a real life caught in a maelstrom of 20th-century horror.
Reitman’s historical novel charts the tragic life of a Jewish artist in World War II Europe.
In 1939, Charlotte Salomon is a young Jewish artist fleeing Berlin. She heads to a place near Nice, France, where her grandparents live. While she is momentarily safe from the situation in Germany, life with her grandparents is not ideal as Charlotte strives to make time for her art. In 1940, after the death of Charlotte’s grandmother, Charlotte and her grandfather are arrested, and Charlotte is sent off to the Gurs Camp in the Pyrenées with thousands of other women. The conditions there are miserable, and the prisoners never know if they will be sent somewhere even more terrible (at least Charlotte manages to befriend some other artists). Although she despises her grandfather by this point, she is eventually released from Gurs so that she may care for him back in Nice. Not that the journey back to Nice is easy—nor is their relationship likely to improve. And though Charlotte will be able to turn more of her attention to her work, her days of relative safety are numbered. Charlotte Salomon was a real person, and the text brings to life her many trials. Readers can clearly imagine her lecherous grandfather, a person who says to her, “Why don’t you share the only bed with me? Please, crawl in. It’s only natural.” Charlotte’s story is compelling, partly due to some surprising twists (the fact that she got to leave the internment camp in Gurs at all is completely unexpected). Some details, though, are dwelled upon without much benefit. Early in the book, great attention is given to an incident in which Charlotte loses an art contest because she is Jewish; the scene is protracted and, considering what else Charlotte will face, not exactly momentous. Still, the story illuminates a complex person trapped in an unthinkable situation, enduring a time when “Everything was getting worse in this broken world.”
A vividly detailed rendering of a real life caught in a maelstrom of 20th-century horror.Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781960573919
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Sibylline Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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