![]() ![]() 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. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. 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. (Literary Guild featured alternate and Doubleday Book Club author tour) Heartfelt but too message-driven'and thus uncompelling'to bring out the Kleenex. More tragedy awaits him, but once more he survives it, buoyed by Uncle Billie’s message'that keeping the light of love bright makes life endurable'a message that, in turn, will later sustain Kathleen. The younger man keeps up Billie’s logbook and now tells Kathleen that it contains a legacy, 'the secret to ageless contentment and ageless love.' Peter tells his own story, how he married Anna before setting off to fight, survived the war though losing his best buddies, and came back to the lighthouse to visit with Anna and their infant daughter Kathleen. In the early 1930s, he’s joined by young Peter, the only survivor of a fiery car crash that killed all of Peter’s family. ![]() ![]() But both Katie and child died in the postwar influenza epidemic, and a grieving Billie returned to America, where he found solace minding the lighthouse. Accompanied by his only daughter, Kathleen, Peter tells how Uncle Billie immigrated to America, married Katie, served in the merchant Navy in WWI, and, having saved his money, returned to Ireland with Katie and their only child. The lighthouse has served not only as a warning to ships but as a metaphorical beacon of hope for men who have found consolation either working the light, as Uncle Billie did, or visiting it later, like Peter. Ranging in place from Ireland to wartime Italy and an island near Nantucket, the story of Billie O' Banyon and his nephew Peter is told in flashbacks as the dying Peter visits Port Hope lighthouse for the last time. 2017.Best-selling Pratt’s second is sweetly sincere but less affecting than his first (The Last Valentine, 1998) in detailing two generations of Irish-American men learning to endure loss. "Bernard Joseph Bretherton." Geocities, Accessed 18 Nov. 2017 "History of the North Head Lighthouse." Keepers of the North Head Lighthouse, /history. "A home on the headlands." Mail Tribune, 31 Oct. Mabel resigned in 1907 and moved to Portland. Lighthouse keepers had a difficult life, often working very long hours. The light functioned from dusk to dawn, limiting cleaning and polishing to the daylight hours. As the only woman assigned there, she assisted with the maintenance of the light and lens, considered the most important job of keepers. Mabel moved to North Head Lighthouse in 1905. Mabel, widowed with three children under 10, became the assistant lighthouse keeper at Cape Blanco in Port Orford. In those days, the lighthouse service often offered employment to widows of keepers. The jobs allowed him to continue his bird studies. They moved to Newport, Ore., in 1894, where he became assistant keeper at the Yaquina Beach Lighthouse, followed by keeper of the Coquille River Lighthouse in Bandon. They had married in 1892 in Sitka, Alaska, and had three children. The first woman lighthouse keeper in Oregon, Mabel Hatch Bretherton, got her first lighthouse job after her husband, Bernard Bretherton, died in 1903. ![]()
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