Next book

TERRIBILITA

A swashbuckling and often surprising novel of Risorgimento Italy.

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

In Shore’s debut historical novel, two men from a famous family prove their worth in the battles of 19th-century Italy.

At the age of 31, Enzo Ferrando is the leader of the longshoremen in the Port of Genoa. He is respected for his abilities—and is also known to be impulsive. When he sinks a ship full of guns belonging to a powerful politician, the fallout leaves his father—an old war hero who served under Garibaldi—dead. Enzo himself is forced to join the Italian army in Eritrea. There he becomes captain of a company in the Galliano Battalion. “I profess that putting eighty-two souls in the hands of a dockworker seems to me dangerous and irresponsible,” he is told by his commanding officer. “But this commission came down from the top, and I am a man that follows orders. Your father had powerful friends.” Enzo soon establishes himself as the rare officer who will work and fight harder than any enlisted man, though his impulsiveness has not much subsided. Against the backdrop of Italy’s misadventures in Africa, Enzo attempts to live up to the name and deeds of his father—and leaves a legacy that his own son, Lucca, will have to live with once he is grown. Shore captures not only the war and politics of the time period, but the romantic lens through which the characters view their world: “The 540 men of Galliano Battalion called the garrison many things but never called it home. When it was not oppression by dust, it could be oppression by fog. Even the fog was dry and hit the lungs more like smoke than vapor, and it rolled in like a sinister mist, sometimes pervading the garrison for days on end.” As the story unfolds, that romanticism—and the heroism, colonialism, and violence it contains—is slowly called into question as the story shifts from the life of Enzo to that of Lucca. The book has a satisfying, unpredictable shape, and the plot—contrived as it often is—is always entertaining. Fans of historical fiction will enjoy this adventure set in a less well-known part of 19th-century Europe.

A swashbuckling and often surprising novel of Risorgimento Italy.

Pub Date: March 18, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-578-63203-2

Page Count: 258

Publisher: Cinder Block Publishing

Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020

Categories:

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 262


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

Next book

THE WOMEN

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 262


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

Next book

THE NIGHTINGALE

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

Close Quickview