Transgression

July 20, 2009
Nichol (Midnight Cab
) easily avoids the sophomore slump with this story of love and betrayal amid the turmoil of WWII. In Nazi-occupied Rouen, France, in 1941, 16-year-old Adele Georges falls in love with a young German soldier named Manfred Halder. They carry out a secret affair while Adele's family falls apart. In a second plot line set in a small Canadian town in 1946, the discovery of a severed finger embroils the brusque police chief, Jack Cullen, in a mystery he must solve to avoid being forced into early retirement and to distract him from his son's wartime death. Back in France, Adele and Manfred are abruptly separated, and in Adele's quest to find him, she meets Canadian soldier Alex Wells, who marries her and brings her home to Canada, where tension builds as the couple adjusts to domestic life in Jack's town. In a not wholly unexpected twist, the two plots meet and the solution to Jack's investigation becomes clear. While the final chapters feel hasty, the vivid prose, harrowing plot and the defiant Adele will keep readers invested in this love story–cum–murder mystery until the very last page.

August 1, 2009
Slow-motion calamity awaits a girl in occupied France who falls in love with a member of the occupying army.

Adele Georges is only looking for news of her father, a Popular Front organizer who's vanished from Arras, where he served in the medical corps. Manfred Halder, the sympathetic clerk who tries to help her get information, is only looking for a separate peace that doesn't involve combat. But Rouen in 1941 is neither the time nor the place for these star-crossed lovers. For three years Adele struggles to keep her affair from both the Gestapo and her brother Ren, who'd think nothing of killing the German corporal who seduced his sister. The Allied invasion of 1944 promises liberation for her country but a fresh round of misery for Adele, reviled as a"horizontal collaborator" and torn from her family, home and lover, who's been shipped to the Eastern Front. Nichol (Midnight Cab, 2004) presents the can't-miss melodrama of Adele's futile search for Manfred and her suffering as she caroms from one horror story to the next with an eye as sensitive to petty humiliations as to life-changing catastrophes, and the result is an odyssey as piercing in its details as it is familiar in its outline. Interspersed flash-forwards to the little town of Paris, Ontario, in 1946, add an additional layer of doom with the discovery of a human finger, then the decaying corpse it belongs to. Who is the man who's been shot execution-style, and how is his fate connected to Adele's? Suspense mounts as local police chief Jack Cullen makes the obligatory round of inquiries and Adele's marriage to a troubled Canadian veteran draws the two stories inexorably together.

The long-awaited climax, though heart-rending, is too anticlimactic to resolve the knotty problems the story has posed. But Nichol makes a persuasive case that it couldn't possibly have done so no matter what.

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September 28, 2009
Sixteen-year-old Adele Georges and German functionary Manfred Halder become lovers in 1941 Vichy, France. Pacifist Manfred is shipped to the Russian front, and Adele is brutalized by her neighbors when she is found to be a "horizontal collaborator." In 1946 Canada, Police Chief Jack Cullen, who lost a son in the war, tries to solve a murder and maintain his hold on a tenuous position. Nichol (Midnight Cab) deftly interweaves the story's two threads in a riveting portrait of youth during a time of madness. Verdict With a perhaps too-blissful ending after such a fraught setup, this novel will still keep fans of wartime drama rapt. For readers who enjoyed Peter Ho Davies's The Welsh Girl, Michael Wallner's April in Paris, and Mackenzie Ford's Gifts of War.-Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal

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