A well-researched, engaging war tale infused with Christmas themes and a gentle romance.
A historical novel throws a young man into the World War I trenches with a glimpse of possible salvation through love.
November 1916. Deep in France in the Valley of the Somme, Harry Wheatly is “sick of dirt, sick of death, and sick of the everlasting mud.” He keeps colorful visions of Saskatchewan, Canada, alive by reading the Bible his grandmother gave him. Tragically, the book falls in the mud, so he takes it on an operation to Amiens, hoping to clean it. But he loses the Bible in a river, where local widow Rosemarie Legrand retrieves it. Seeing that the book is soaked, Harry loses hope until Rosemarie offers to dry it in the sun daily until his return. She treats the task like a mission: It is “vital to her to rescue his book as if it too had become a victim of war.” When possible, he brings Rosemarie and her son, Marcel, rations, but always deems the Bible in need of more drying as an excuse to return. Rosemarie eagerly anticipates Harry’s visits as he earns her love, and he tries to see her every Christmas morning as the war continues. But in 1918, when the Germans press into France, she must flee to the countryside and they lose track of each other. After the Armistice, Harry is sent to Wales. He contracts the Spanish flu, putting his love and life at risk. In the postwar chaos, many obstacles must be overcome if the lovers are to reunite. Warfield (Valentines From Bath, 2019, etc.) has authored numerous historical novels and this fourth entry in the Holiday Collection series continues to demonstrate her mastery of period details. The passages about civilian living conditions, military movements, and the soldiers’ challenges lend a laudable degree of authenticity to the story (When Harry “first reached France, he had found solace in writing poetry, but he had long run out of metaphors for death...Harry was sure he had begun to go mad the morning it occurred to him that even the fighting would be preferable to the long slow annihilation of those trapped in the hell of the trenches”). The romance is quiet with a touch of passion. A minor flaw is the lack of maps for readers who are less informed about World War I.
A well-researched, engaging war tale infused with Christmas themes and a gentle romance.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73324-501-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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