A High and Hidden Place

While watching television in the aftermath of President Kennedy's assassination, journalist Christine Lenoir witnesses Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. This traumatic experience opens the floodgates of memory, causing her to wonder what in her sheltered French childhood could have produced such shadowy images of gunshots, fire and death. Raised by nuns since the age of six, Christine has always believed that her parents died in an influenza epidemic, but as she gradually pieces her childhood together, she learns that her family members were killed in the June 10, 1944, massacre of OradoursurGlane, a French village just outside of Limoges. On that day, German soldiers rounded up 642 men, women and children in the village and killed them for no apparent reason. Lucas, a firsttime novelist, does a fine job of blending her extensive research into Oradour's history with the story of the fictional character Christine, who escaped the massacre because she was playing in the woods. At times, the novel's shifting time frames can be disorienting, switching too often between the present in 1964, the wartime massacre nearly twenty years before, and the near past in 1963. However, the characterizations are haunting, and readers will feel compelled to turn the pages to find out whether Christine will be able to heal from the terrible burden of knowing her family's fate. In particular, Lucas does an outstanding job of weaving Catholic themes and faith through the book, daring to ask the unanswerable, ageold questions about God, suffering and the human capacity for evil.