A graceful meditation on history and nature by an author well worth knowing.
Lyrical novel of the ancient Mediterranean by Croatian writer Perišić.
Three principal characters move Perišić’s loping tale. The first is Miu, a cat, which, like all cats, “does not know the difference between a palace and a neglected yard.” The second is young Kalia, a son of Sparta’s sole colony, who, in another colony, finds himself enslaved. The third is a persistent wind, which explains, “I’m not an ordinary spirit, the way people imagine—a person’s ghost or some such thing—but I am from a family of wind spirits, dragged from the upper parts of the atmosphere by some dramatic events.” Floating back and forth among contending Carthaginians and Syracusans, the wind comments on the ways of the world even as humans, with all their vain wishes, find new ways to invite the gods’ wrath. The obnoxious child of Kalia’s owner tries to torture Miu, ordering Kalia to perform the most savage of acts, bellowing, “I am her master and she needs to love me. She needs to hate you!” It doesn’t work on animals, animal behavior being one of the wind’s chief topics. It certainly doesn’t work on Kalia, who rebels, stealing away to yet another colony far up the neck of the Adriatic Sea in what is reputed to be “the end of the world,” a place called Liburnia, modern Croatia. Perišić takes his time in pulling the threads of the story together, and in any event that story is less memorable than the delightful apothegms with which he adorns his prose. The wind always has the best lines—including, thousands of years after Kalia’s time, while looking down at an alley cat that may well be a descendant of Miu’s, a wistful reminder that she (our wind is a female) needs to find balance lest she go crazy pondering the ways of humans: “That would not be good for the climate. Everything is quite wobbly already.”
A graceful meditation on history and nature by an author well worth knowing.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-9-53351-399-7
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Sandorf Passage
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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