From Publishers Weekly
As in her earlier novels, Shreve (Eden Close) affectingly explores themes of love and loss with piercing clarity, once again capturing the fragile emotions of those in pain. Here, however, she moves from her customary domestic, contemporary milieu to WWII Europe?to the Belgian village of Delahaut, where young Claire Daussois and her husband, Henri, are members of an underground resistance movement. When a British plane goes down outside the town in December 1943, the plucky 10-year-old Jean Benoit finds a survivor, Ted Brice, hides him in his father's barn and then summons the aid of Mme. Daussois. As she has done with other refugees, Claire shelters the 22-year-old captain in her attic. When it becomes necessary for Henri to go into hiding, Claire and Ted embark on a brief affair, a passionate liaison made more poignant by its simultaneous inevitability and futility. With deceptive simplicity and superb control, Shreve evokes the impersonal horrors of wartime and its heartbreaking personal tragedies?often combining those elements to almost overwhelming effect, as when Jean witnesses the execution of several townspeople as reprisal for their resistance activities. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
YA?In December 1943, an American fighter plane is downed near a small village in Belgium. The pilot, Lt. Ted Brice, is rescued by a member of the local resistance movement. As he is hidden in the small attic at the home of Claire Daussois, he becomes acutely aware of the danger to himself as well as his hostess and her husband. A bond develops between Claire and Ted during his 20-day stay that changes both of their lives forever. Through this fast-paced novel, YAs will gain insight into the unthinkable horrors of World War II-German retribution, village collaborators, and local resistance workers. Shreve describes the landscape and the local residents in such detail that readers will quickly become involved in the lives of the characters.?Roberta Lisker, W.T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VACopyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Rollene Saal
... Ms. Shreve adds subtle gray shadings to a familiar morality tale ...


From Booklist
This story of impossible love was perhaps easy for Shreve to outline, but a challenge to fill out in detail. That she carries it through successfully retains her extant fans (e.g., Where or When, 1993), and snags as well readers piqued by novels featuring Nazi hellhounds. They're after Ted Brice, a downed B-17 pilot who finds succor and more from an unhappily married Belgian woman, Claire, who furnishes a safe house for the resistance. After hesitant preliminaries, the lovers love in Shreve's tender rendering, but their idyll shatters with Brice's inevitable attempt to escape the hounds milling about. He is betrayed to the Gestapo, but the mystery of how hangs until 50 years later, when Shreve brings together the lovechild of the liaison with an elderly Claire, who reveals the secret of her husband's betrayal of the American. Shreve's strength is constructing the mood and texture of little intimacies, and, set against the huge context of Nazi occupation, they seem all the more worthwhile, however fleeting. A touching tome from a skilled pen. Gilbert Taylor

FROM THE PUBLISHER

As she has done in her novels Eden Close, Strange Fits of Passion, and Where or When, Anita Shreve once again leads readers into a harrowing world where lives are catastrophically overturned by emotion. Set in a Belgian village amid the wreckage of World War II, Resistance is a powerful exploration of passion, self-discovery, and sacrifice from one of our most accomplished storytellers. Just as the Nazi occupation forces have drained her village of coffee, meat, and chocolate, the war has also depleted whatever joy there may have been in Claire Daussois's marriage. On their small farm in the south of Belgium, Claire and her husband, Henri, shelter refugees - Jews, Allied pilots, and fleeing Belgian soldiers - before passing them along toward France and freedom. Claire nurses the wounded, acts as interpreter, and waits for the war to end - and, in a way she finds difficult to admit even to herself, for her own life to change. And it does, when an American B-17 bomber is downed near their village. The pilot, badly injured, is found by a young boy who turns to Claire for help in saving him. Henri is away on Resistance work. As the pilot heals and recovers in her attic hiding place, Claire begins to awaken to the possibility of love. Over the course of a mere twenty days, closed off from the world and the war in her farmhouse, Claire and Lieutenant Ted Brice experience a life-changing passion that neither has felt before. That their love is also haunted and impossible only makes it more precious. The war recedes in the face of their joy - before imposing itself once more with shocking suddenness and inconceivable horror. Resistance is the story of a young Belgian woman, an American pilot, and the small war-torn village that shelters them. Richly peopled and fearlessly, gorgeously passionate, it is a powerful exploration of emotion at odds with commitment. No reader who has loved - or resisted love - will forget this lucid and moving tale.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

As in her earlier novels, Shreve (Eden Close) affectingly explores themes of love and loss with piercing clarity, once again capturing the fragile emotions of those in pain. Here, however, she moves from her customary domestic, contemporary milieu to WWII Europe-to the Belgian village of Delahaut, where young Claire Daussois and her husband, Henri, are members of an underground resistance movement. When a British plane goes down outside the town in December 1943, the plucky 10-year-old Jean Benoit finds a survivor, Ted Brice, hides him in his father's barn and then summons the aid of Mme. Daussois. As she has done with other refugees, Claire shelters the 22-year-old captain in her attic. When it becomes necessary for Henri to go into hiding, Claire and Ted embark on a brief affair, a passionate liaison made more poignant by its simultaneous inevitability and futility. With deceptive simplicity and superb control, Shreve evokes the impersonal horrors of wartime and its heartbreaking personal tragedies-often combining those elements to almost overwhelming effect, as when Jean witnesses the execution of several townspeople as reprisal for their resistance activities.

School Library Journal