A worthwhile addition to the Blackbeard canon.
There’s always room for another treatment of the Blackbeard story, especially with two worthy adversaries.
The early 18th century was the great age of piracy in the Caribbean and off the East Coast of America. The most notorious of those pirates was Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard. On the other side was Lt. Robert Maynard, of the Royal Navy. Doggett’s historical novel begins as Maynard and his superior, Capt. Ellis Brand, have been ordered to find and arrest the brigand and end his reign of terror. To sweeten the pot, the King has decreed that pirates who abjure their wicked ways within a year will be pardoned. (At one point, Teach raises the possibility of a pardon to his crew but backs down.) We first meet the pirates at New Providence, their “capital” in the Bahamas. Pirate Woodes Rogers has accepted the pardon and been named governor of those islands. When he sails in to take up his protective new position, the pirates give him a fiery welcome and go off a-plundering. Blackbeard, with his captured French slave ship now christened the “Queen Anne’s Revenge,” along with his confederate Richard Richards captaining another “Revenge,” eventually make their way to Charles Town in South Carolina, blockade the port, and bleed the town dry of its treasure. Now Brand and Maynard are more determined than ever to catch their quarry. Eventually, off the coast of North Carolina, there comes a showdown, Blackbeard and Maynard, mano a mano, and the decks become awash with blood. History buffs will know the end result, but there are no spoilers here. Blackbeard says, prophetically, “Your name will be known only because of mine, Mr. Maynard.” Teach was an actual, historical, person and tailor made for the character that we know: a larger-than-life man who played the part of a demon from Hell so well that his prey usually gave up without a fight. His fate, ably told here, is very fitting. Doggett knows the pirate idiom well and creates some nuanced characters, Blackbeard the most fascinatingly realized of them all.
A worthwhile addition to the Blackbeard canon.Pub Date: April 4, 2024
ISBN: 9798321225110
Page Count: 244
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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