Seventh volume in the Richard Sharpe Napoleonic Wars saga, about a former enlisted man who won a battlefield commission at the battle of Talavera in 1809, has spent six volumes fighting the Peninsular campaign in Spain and Portugal and has at last, under Wellington, invaded France in mid-1813. Sharpe is now a major, but attrition has reduced his famed South Essex regiment to half. strength, and no replacements are being sent to the regiment's Spanish bivouac. What's worse, news is that his South Essex regiment soon will be disbanded and his battle-seasoned troops drawn off into other regiments. This is too much for Sharpe to bear, especially since his regiment was distinguished for capturing the first eagle insigne from a French flag in the war against Napoleon. Accompanied by his faithful Irish giant Sergeant Harper, Sharpe sails to England to find out for himself the best way to snatch his regiment from the jaws of bureaucracy. A companion regiment stationed in England, from which he had hoped to draw troops, suddenly doesn't exist—except on paper. Everywhere that Sharpe hunts for it proves a blind alley. Somebody is carrying on a tremendous cover up and milking the War Office for gold to support a literally invisible regiment. To find out where this hidden pool of troops might be, Sharpe and Harper strip themselves of their uniforms and pass themselves off as old soldiers ready to reenlist in the missing regiment. A recruiting sergeant, in a dreadfully oppressive scene, indeed signs them up along with other recruits and ships them off to boot camp, This turns out to be a hidden mudhole on Foulness island, where Sharpe and Harper go through weeks of brutal training as recruits. Eventually, they escape from the island and pursue the trail of graft into the highest levels of the court before returning to their regiment with the needed troops and gearing up for the invasion of France. Livelier than usual, in fact quite original in that Sharpe gives up his command and finds himself in the foulest, pest-ridden depths of army life.
Pub Date: July 1, 1986
ISBN: 0140294368
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1986
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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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