Kristin Hannah
RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
Nonetheless, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary braveness and endurance of Frenchwomen throughout World Conflict II.
In 1995, an aged unnamed widow is shifting into an Oregon nursing dwelling on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invite to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: individuals who aided the escape of others in the course of the warfare. Reduce to spring, 1940: Viann has stated goodbye to husband Antoine, who’s off to carry the Maginot line in opposition to invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, within the Loire Valley, educating on the native faculty and dealing with daughter Sophie’s adolescent revolt. Quickly, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged youthful sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of a number of convent colleges, is distributed to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Nice Conflict veteran. Because the depredations improve within the occupied zone—meals rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a legal responsibility. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for harmful responsibility: shepherding downed Allied airmen throughout the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many earlier than she’s captured. In the meantime, Viann’s journey from passive to energetic resistance is much less dramatic however no much less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, by means of hunger, intimidation and barbarity each informal and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a neighborhood collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of greater than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s confirmed storytelling expertise are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic occasions, however her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this story.
Nonetheless, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Web page Rely: 448
Writer: St. Martin’s
Assessment Posted On-line: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Opinions Difficulty: Dec. 1, 2014