Hope, excitement, and tragedy will keep rapt readers reaching for their tissues.
Three strangers become friends amid the Nazi bombing of London.
In 1944, fierce aerial fighting rages over London as the bombs and rockets continue killing and maiming English civilians. A 13-year-old “East End bloke” navigates the rubble and looks for things to steal. He always wishes for inclement weather so the Jerries won’t bomb them. In the few pieces of clothing he owns, his gran has sewn a label: “The Honorable Charles Elias Matters,” with his address. His parents and grandfather have been killed, and Gran thinks Charlie is going to school every day. Instead, he’s decided to get his education on the street. The well-to-do 15-year-old Molly Wakefield returns from the safety of the countryside to her parents’ London house, but the parents are nowhere to be found, and she meets Charlie as he hides in her yard. Ignatius Oliver runs The Book Keep in Covent Garden, a shop started by his late wife, Imogen. Charlie sneaks in and nicks some money and a book filled with blank pages, imagining he can sell it for the paper, but when he realizes that Ignatius knows where he lives, he tries to return everything. Ignatius catches him, but lets him keep the book, which plays a fateful role when it changes hands again. Before long the three become friends, all sharing common bonds of danger, humanity, and heartbreaking loss. All have their complex stories: Despite her youth, Molly wants to treat the wounded, and she’s good at it; Ignatius is a part-time air warden who’s burdened by a dark secret about himself; and Charlie is party to a foot chase in which one of his mates and a police officer are accidentally killed. Charlie frets that he might hang. Meanwhile, the buzz of the V-1 rocket gives way to the silence of the V-2, and life or death are the devil’s toss of a coin. Baldacci weaves the trio’s lives together seamlessly, even though each comes from a different stratum of society.
Hope, excitement, and tragedy will keep rapt readers reaching for their tissues.Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781538742051
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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