To Die Beautiful

December 1, 2022

In award-winning debuter Bell's The Disenchantment, unhappily married Baroness Marie Catherine and self-confident Mademoiselle de Conti become lovers in a 17th-century Paris beset by scheming nobility and servants immured in witchcraft (35,000-copy first printing). In The Secret Book of Flora Lea, from New York Times best-selling, Christy Award-winning Henry, Hazel unwraps a package at the rare bookstore where she works to discover a book telling the story she made up for her little sister, who vanished after they were evacuated from World War II London two decades previously. Jackson follows up award-winning nonfiction with To Die Beautiful, based on the life of World War II Dutch Resistance fighter Hannie Schaft, who also figures in Noelle Salazar's recent Angels of the Resistance (50,000-copy first printing). In Morton's latest, Jess has an uncomfortable Homecoming when she returns from London to Australia after the grandmother who raised her is hospitalized; she learns that her family is linked to a horrific unsolved 1959 crime (250,000-copy first printing).New York Times best-selling author Noble tells the story of The Tiffany Girls, who did much of the design and construction of Tiffany's glorious glassworks without credit (75,000-copy first printing). Paul's Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? features Elise St. John, a young Black woman who is startled that she and her sisters have inherited the multimillion-dollar estate of star Kitty Karr Tate; then she learns that Kitty was actually her grandmother, passing for white (100,000-copy first printing). After the celebratedAriadne and Elektra, Saint brings us Atalanta, the story of a masterly huntress who was the only woman to sail with the Argonauts (125,000-copy first printing). A four-time winner of the American Library Association's William Boyd Young Award (for excellence in military fiction), New York Times best-selling author Shaara limns the life of Theodore Roosevelt in The Old Lion (100,000-copy first printing). Working at the Jeu de Paume during World War II after having fled Germany, Sophie executes a Paris Deception in Turnbull's latest; she rescues modernist paintings looted from Jewish families and set for destruction by smuggling them out of the museum and replacing them with forgeries created by her sister-in-law (75,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing). Famed novelist/historian Weir follows up her "Six Tudor Queens" series by reimagining Henry VIII in The King's Pleasure.

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March 15, 2023
A real-life hero of the Dutch resistance gets a fictionalized life story. In the early years of Germany's occupation of the Netherlands, Hannie Schaft, a law student in Amsterdam, feels helpless. She wants to help her fellow countrymen and -women, but she's not sure how. But before she knows it, a job volunteering with the refugee alliance becomes something bigger. The alliance is actually part of the resistance, and Hannie is recruited to become a full-fledged member. As the Nazis' persecution of Dutch Jews intensifies, she moves home to Haarlem, bringing her Jewish friends Philine and Sonja with her. There, she learns how to shoot a gun and run undercover operations She quickly becomes such a notorious killer that the Nazis begin searching for the Girl with Red Hair. But as the war progresses, it becomes harder and harder for Hannie and her friends (and lover) in the resistance to survive Nazi persecution. Americans are likely unfamiliar with Schaft's biography, and Jackson's novel should bring a welcome renewal of attention to a particularly steely and heroic member of the European resistance. Unfortunately, Jackson, who has a Ph.D. in history and has previously published works of nonfiction, fails to do her subject justice. Her Hannie is constantly insecure and waiting for instruction from others, and when she does embark on a mission, things usually go so smoothly that she rarely feels at risk. The novel lacks a real sense of the suspense, dread, and, above all, the fury and despair that Schaft must have experienced. Strangely, many of the more complex missions Schaft participated in are relegated to an author's note. These details would have given Schaft a deeper and more complex sense of personhood. A misguided effort to resurrect a worthy historical figure.

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March 15, 2023
After the assassination of a high-ranking SS officer in a cobblestoned alley, word begins to spread about the Girl with Red Hair. But Hannie Schaft's journey to becoming a fighter for the Dutch Resistance started long before that night, told step by gripping step in this novel based on the true story of a woman who, in her early 20s, hunted down Nazi officers and Dutch collaborators during WWII. The timid, studious university student who once dreamed of becoming a League of Nations lawyer undertakes steadily more risky acts of defiance against the occupiers, from merely delivering supplies to stealing IDs to carrying a loaded gun. She conceals her Jewish friends and begins to fall for a fellow Resistance fighter, working to find any act, no matter how small, to combat the enemy. Exquisitely balanced between cloak-and-dagger secrecy, the grinding realities of waiting out your quarry, and the crushing fear of discovery, To Die Beautiful displays the courage and power of a woman committed to doing what is right in a world gone terribly wrong.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.