At once well told and ineffably sad. Read it but keep your tissues handy.
A young man and the people he loves struggle to survive the Nazi occupation of Poland.
On September 1, 1939, the first day the bombs fall, Reuven Berkovitz and Zelda Abramovitch are in love and dream of a life together. Reuven helps his papa, Lev, an umbrella maker in Kraków who takes great pride in his work. But soon, German soldiers occupy Poland and force Papa to hand his shop over to a non-Jew. “Suddenly,” the 17-year-old Reuven says, “Papa and I were no longer umbrella makers. We were nothing.” The vise closes quickly on Jewish society, and “within nine months, the Germans had stolen our business, belongings, and identities.” Then the Jews of Kraków are confined within heavily guarded walls while the rest of the city goes about its daily business. Reuven has one advantage: Due to his fair coloring, he can easily pass for gentile. But the two lovers are separated early on, and Reuven’s unflinching desire to find Zelda is the engine that drives this compelling and heartbreaking debut novel. Once he witnesses the murder of his family, grief becomes his “constant companion....No matter how trapped [he] felt in [his] prison of melancholy, she was the one thing worth living for.” For a while, he survives by working on a farm and pretending he’s mute. Later, he’s on a work crew assigned to smash headstones then dig up and burn decaying bodies in a Jewish cemetery so a road can be built through it. The calculated and often casual cruelty is painful to read, even for those familiar with the dark history of antisemitism and the Nazi thugocracy. Reuven’s experiences feel so immediate that we want to cry with him. Will he ever find Zelda? Will they ever emerge together on the other side of the war? Will hope finally triumph over horror? A sympathetic Catholic man speaks to Reuven of a “memory now braided, like the bread, with love and grief.” Author Lending’s great-grandfather was an umbrella maker in Warsaw in the late 1800s and served as his inspiration.
At once well told and ineffably sad. Read it but keep your tissues handy.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780063413849
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
