![]() Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Beck, at Le Jardin-Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. 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. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. ![]() 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. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. 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. In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. is but a war after a war, a war before a war.”ĭoctorow’s previous novels have earned multiple major literary awards. Behind it all stalks the brilliant, conflicted, “volatile” Sherman, to whom Doctorow gives this stunning climactic statement: “our civil war. Doctorow patiently weaves these and several other stories together, while presenting military strategies (e.g., the “vise” formed by Sherman’s gradual meeting with Grant’s Army) with exemplary clarity. There’s even a brief appearance by indignantly independent black “Coalhouse” Walker (a graceful nod to the aforementioned Ragtime). Sherman’s war-loving subordinate Justin “Kil” Kilpatrick blithely rapes and loots, finding a boy’s excitement in bloody exigencies. John Jameson’s “white Negro” bastard daughter Pearl becomes her former mistress’s keeper-and the last best hope for melancholy “replacement” northern soldier Stephen Walsh. “Rebel” soldiers Will Kirkland and Arly Wilcox move duplicitously from one army to another, and the Falstaffian pragmatist Arly later courts survival by usurping the identity of a battlefield photographer. Emily Thompson, daughter of a Georgia Chief Justice, finds her calling as a battlefield nurse working alongside Union Army surgeon Wrede Sartorius (who’ll later be reassigned to Washington, where an incident at Ford’s Theater demands his services). ![]() The narrative expands as Sherman moves north, adding characters and subtly entwining their destinies with that of the nation. The story begins in Georgia, where John Jameson’s homestead “Fieldstone” becomes a casualty of Sherman’s “scorched earth” tactics (earlier applied during the destruction of Atlanta). William Tecumseh Sherman’s legendary “march” (1864–65) through Georgia and the Carolinas-toward Appomattox, and victory-is the subject of Doctorow’s panoramic tenth novel.Īs he did in his classic Ragtime (1991), Doctorow juxtaposes grand historical events with the lives of people caught up in them-here, nearly two dozen Union and Confederate soldiers and officers and support personnel plantation owners and their families and freed slaves unsure where their futures lie.
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