News of Our Loved Ones

October 8, 2018
DeWitt (Lili) explores how the American invasion of Normandy changes the destiny of one family in this moving tale of sorrow reverberating across generations. During four years of Nazi occupation, when the people of Caen were forced to choose dangerous resistance or shameful cooperation, the Delasalles have survived by keeping a low profile as their Jewish neighbors are arrested or sent to death camps. Sixteen-year-old Yvonne sees out the war in Caen with her family, but her younger sister, Genevieve, has been sent to Paris to live with her aunt in order to try out for the music conservatory. When the Allies are on the brink of liberating France, Yvonne and her mother and grandmother are all killed in an air strike. Black sheep Genevieve leaves her descendants a legacy of half-truths and blank spots about the family. Tracking backward in time, the book alternates chapters among the Delasalles, exploring their lives leading up to the war. Later sections feature other voices, including future generations of the Delasalle family struggling to uncover the past and deal with the remaining trauma of a family broken by war. DeWitt switches between the occupation and the postwar period with mixed effect. She writes in spare prose and has a knack for lovely turns of phrase (“Mathilde herself is my only clear memory of Paris”), but the separate sections rarely feel distinct in their voices. Still, this is an effective and affecting tale of wartime loss and the way that weight of sorrow is held through generations.

August 1, 2018
The experiences, perspectives, and secrets of a French family during the Nazi occupation and after World War II.DeWitt (Dogs, 2010, etc.) spins a complex web of memories as she tells the story of the Delasalle family. Early in the book we meet Geneviève, who has gone to Paris to audition for the National Conservatory. Her younger sisters, Françoise and Yvonne; her grandmother; her mother; and her stepfather, Henri, live in occupied Caen, Normandy; her brother, Simon, and her aunt Chouchotte also live in Paris. On D-Day, Caen is bombed, and some family members are killed. The book centers on how the characters who are left recall those times. The postwar sections focus on Geneviève as a grown woman, married to an American and returning to France every summer with her children, and about what became of the others. These sections move between the past and present as the characters remember. The chapters in which Françoise and Chouchotte revisit memories are compelling and successfully portray the indelible impact of the war on people who lived through it. A few friends of the family have their own chapters, and those, while interesting, seem somewhat tangential. Polly, Geneviève's youngest daughter, lives the war through her mother's stories and her other relatives' silences, and her chapters reveal the war's impact on the next generation. DeWitt successfully conveys the way memories vary from one person to the next, so that for example, Simon, Geneviève, and Chouchotte have different recollections of the moment they met on a Paris street and Simon's wife blurted out the news of the deaths in Caen. The Jewish characters here are mostly admired by the French gentiles, and one Jewish man, a pediatrician in the Delasalle's hometown, has young mothers fawning over him. Perhaps because widespread anti-Semitism features in much of the fiction set in World War II-era France (such as Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française), its absence, especially among the Delasalle family, is notable.A war story that focuses on the psychological aftermath rather than the wartime experience itself.

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September 1, 2018
Even in the midst of a terrible war, it's possible to find beauty in life. Sixteen-year-old Yvonne is preoccupied by thoughts of the young man who had been riding his bicycle by her house when the Allies start dropping bombs on the French countryside during D-Day. A Jewish doctor living in hiding as a Gentile in Paris attempts to paint a marigold while certain that the SS is about to arrest him. With masterful artistry, DeWitt weaves together the individual narratives of relations both during WWII and for decades afterward, creating a multilayered narrative of survival and redemption. While not all the members of the family survive the war, those who do pass along their stories to the next generation, so a young girl on a beach vacation imagines how she would react if brought in for interrogation under the Nazis. Each story can stand on its own, but together they offer a powerful kaleidoscopic view of the many ways war takes its toll and the small moments of beauty it nevertheless contains.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)