A compelling, female-centric combat tale involving Russians and Nazis.
A female fighter pilot flies above the Eastern Front in this debut World War II novel.
Twenty-year-old Junior Lt. Nadya Buzina is still a novice pilot—she hasn’t even made her first kill—when she tangles with a German ace in the skies above the Don. Both Nadya and the ace end up crashed and stranded on the ground. Nadya manages to escape capture by the Nazis—the ace does not try to stop her—and makes it back to the Russian line, where her injuries are treated. Reeling from the guilt over the death of another pilot who was killed on the mission, Nadya begins to doubt her own abilities as a soldier, as well as the worthiness of the machine she serves. She gets on the wrong side of a commissar named Petrov, who seems bent on proving that Nadya is a coward and traitor. All the while, Nadya fights the Luftwaffe in the clouds, while on the ground she deals with unexpected romantic feelings for her female mechanic. It all leads, inevitably, to a clash in Stalingrad: “a last stand,” one character remarks, one “we may lose.” Love, revenge, and the future of her homeland are all on the line when Nadya takes to the skies above the war’s bloodiest battlefield for a reunion with the German ace. Taylor tells Nadya’s story with a great degree of control. The pacing and tension pull the reader forward with the speed of a fighter plane, while still managing to communicate the mounting losses and horrors of combat on the Eastern Front. The dialogue sometimes tends toward clichés: “I always did break the rules,” Nadya muses, while another pilot shouts overs the radio, “Damn it, Nadya…You aren’t allowed to die.” On the whole, however, the characters are well drawn, and their arcs move in unexpected directions. Though some scenes drift into melodrama, the ending manages to satisfy the reader while still staying true to the tremendous devastation of the war in which it is set.
A compelling, female-centric combat tale involving Russians and Nazis.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Tiny Fox Press
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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