A war tale that delivers an impressive blend of historical research and narrative drama.
A rising baseball star volunteers to serve overseas in World War II and later struggles to bear the weight of what he witnessed in this novel.
Professional baseball star Will Jamison is an unsolved mystery, a historical enigma. A talented up-and-coming player for the Washington Senators, he’s “on top of his game, with money, fame, women.” Then, in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he enlists in the Army despite being given ample opportunity and the promise of a considerable payoff from the Senators’ owner, Clark Griffith, to continue to play. In fact, even once he’s a soldier, Will is offered a chance to avoid the perils of combat and play ball for the 84th Infantry Division. Yet again, he eschews the easy way out and chooses to become an anonymous soldier, a “common infantryman.” He distinguishes himself in war, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and earning a Silver Star. When he returns to the United States, he rejoins the Senators, and only a month into the season, his skills beginning to regain their former luster, unceremoniously quits, subsequently vanishing forever from the public eye. Kutler suspensefully unravels the puzzle that is Will’s life and the burdensome emotional pain he shoulders in the aftermath of the war.
While the author’s book is fictional, the rigorous historical research he must have done to achieve such an impressive sense of period authenticity is evident on virtually every page. Kutler vividly portrays the excitement of American baseball, but the best sections of the work are devoted to the depiction of the war and the horrors that were committed in its name. Will’s trauma is powerfully described—forced to helplessly witness unspeakable barbarism, he is forever changed, his experience “etched in his memory for eternity.” The author also gives readers some intelligently conceived insights into Will’s past, especially his “tenuous childhood.” Similarly, his love for Kay Barlow as well as his struggle to reconnect with her following the war are poignantly described: “I love her. He knew because every time he found himself in a shadowy corner since returning from the war, mired in despairing emotions and haunting memories that plagued him since he left Belgium, he thought of her.” Kutler’s prose is consistently lucid, but he can strain a bit laboriously to elicit an emotional response from readers, a tendency that flirts with lachrymose manipulation. For example, the author takes gratuitous pains to demonstrate, in long, drawn-out scenes, Will’s honorable resistance to using his celebrity to avoid military service. In addition, the insertion of a “historical note” further explicating the Battle of the Bulge is more intrusive than clarifying—it has the effect of lifting readers out of the story, suspending a complete literary immersion. Nonetheless, this is an emotionally affecting story, both heart-rending and thrilling, as dramatically captivating as it is historically edifying.
A war tale that delivers an impressive blend of historical research and narrative drama.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Warriors Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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