At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf

Tara Ison

eBook - 2023

At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf is the story of a twelve-year-old Parisian Jewish girl in World War II France, living "in hiding" as a Catholic orphan with a family in a small village. When Danielle Marton's father is killed during the early days of the German Occupation, her mother sends her to live in a quiet farming town near Limoges in Vichy France. Now called Marie-Jeanne Chantier, Danielle struggles to balance the truth of what's happened to her family and her country with the lies she must tell to keep herself safe. At first, she's bitter about being left behind by her mother, and horrified at having to milk the cow and memorize Catholic prayers for church. But as the years pass and the Occupation worsens, ...Danielle finds it easier to suppress her former life entirely, and Marie-Jeanne becomes less and less of an act. By the time she's fifteen and there is talk amongst the now divided town of an Allied invasion, not only has Danielle lost the memories of her father's face and the smell of her mother's perfume, but her very self, transforming into a strict Catholic and an anti-Semitic, fervent disciple of fascism.

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Subjects
Published
[United States] : Ig Publishing 2023.
Language
English
Corporate Author
hoopla digital
Main Author
Tara Ison (-)
Corporate Author
hoopla digital (-)
Online Access
Instantly available on hoopla.
Cover image
Physical Description
1 online resource
Format
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
ISBN
9781632461469
Access
AVAILABLE FOR USE ONLY BY IOWA CITY AND RESIDENTS OF THE CONTRACTING GOVERNMENTS OF JOHNSON COUNTY, UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS, HILLS, AND LONE TREE (IA).
Contents unavailable.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Ison follows Rockaway with a chilling psychological portrait of a young Jewish girl hiding in France during WWII. After 12-year-old Danielle's father is shot dead in the street by a German soldier in 1941 for being Jewish, Danielle's mother leaves her in the care of a couple posing as her aunt and uncle in a remote village in southern France. Now known as Marie-Jeanne, she attends the local Catholic church and school and tries to blend in. Terrified of being found out, Marie-Jeanne rehearses her false identity to the minutest detail, failing to realize that in the process she's becoming brainwashed into collaborating with the Germans and forgetting who she really is. Then Lucien Bonnard, a young, handsome, and seemingly sympathetic Vichy official, flirts with the impressionable Marie-Jeanne, and she doesn't realize until later that he's tricked her into giving up her best friend, who likely ends up in Auschwitz. Finely drawn characters and scenes of rural life complement Ison's unique vision and original spin on a familiar set-up. This challenging work stands out among historical fiction of the period. (Feb.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A Jewish girl comes of age in Vichy France, relentlessly deformed by the spiritual rot of her era. "My name is Marie-Jeanne Chantier, and I am twelve years old. My parents named me for the Blessed Virgin, and also for Saint Jeanne d'Arc, the young girl who had short hair and saved France from hostile foreign invaders a long time ago....Maman and Papa died last year in a tragic car accident outside Paris, bringing toys to poor orphans at the convent. Now I live here in the country in La Perrine, with tante Berthe, tonton Claude, and cousin Luc, who were very kind to take me in with good Christian charity and give me such a wonderful home." So says a "stupid assignment" written for school by a clever Parisian preteen actually named Danielle Marton. In fact, Danielle's Jewish mother has smuggled her to the countryside to masquerade as the niece of former family servants while she herself faces the jaws of the wolf--which have already snapped shut on her husband, Danielle's beloved Papa. Though in many obvious ways this third novel is a departure from Ison's previous work, including Ball (2015), a collection of contemporary gothic horror stories, on closer examination this is a horror story: The newly minted Marie-Jeanne seems to cathect the evil around her until she has completely forgotten who she is, what she cares about, whom she loves. Ison is unflinching in her depiction of the self-inflicted corruption that replaces the character's moral core with a twisted version of Christianity, brilliantly illustrating the epigraph from Solzhenitsyn: "To do evil, a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good." Most abhorrent are the trajectories of Marie-Jeanne's friendship with her peers--Genevieve, another Jewish girl in hiding, and her "cousin" Luc, who undergoes a transformation diametrically opposed to hers. Free of sentiment but not without hope of redemption, this is a suspenseful and chilling story. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.