The usual splendid stuff from the master of historical battle. There’s a bit of deus ex machina, but it’s tolerable.
An archer on the lam from a bum rap in his county ships out with Henry V to test his shooting and slashing skills at one of the bloodiest but most glorious battles in history.
Cornwell (Sword Song, 2008, etc.), having dealt in gorgeous detail with the role of the longbow at Crecy in his three-volume Archer series, effectively laid the groundwork for this single-volume assessment of the great victory at Agincourt. The hero this time is Nicholas Hood, easily the best archer in his neighborhood, but stuck like his younger brother at the bottom of the local food chain even though he is probably the bastard child of the local squire Lord Slayton. The Hood family was cursed by the evil Perrill family, and the two clans have been feuding for generations. The Perrills, with assistance from dastardly priest Sir Martin, frame the Hooks with a capital crime, forcing Nicholas to leave for London, then ship out for France in the King’s forces. Across the channel he is witness to slaughter and treachery at the siege of Soissons, where, following emergency prayers to St. Crispin and St. Crispinian, he acquires their saintly protection and advice as well as the companionship of lovely local lass Melisande, bastard daughter of one of the greatest French warriors. There is barely time to rest before Nicholas and Melisande ship out again, this time with the King and his expeditionary force. Prince Hal hopes to reclaim his French crown, but his strategy runs afoul of steely resistance by the defenders of the Seine port Harfleur. What was to have been a walkover turns into a long siege in which dysentery claims as many victims as battle. The finally victorious but much depleted English force, instead of calling it a day, heads under Henry toward Calais, a march that draws the attention of the vastly larger French army and finally leads to battle in the sodden fields outside the village the French call Azincourt.
The usual splendid stuff from the master of historical battle. There’s a bit of deus ex machina, but it’s tolerable.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-157891-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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