Affecting characters and dramatic storytelling overcome an occasionally argot-laden plot.
A U.S. physician with a specialty in infectious diseases fights against the 1918 influenza pandemic in Cornish’s debut work of historical fiction.
Maj. Edward Noble, overseeing American soldiers during “The War,” is ordered back to Boston to ensure diseases don’t continue to spike the mortality rate. He soon learns of the high death rate from influenza, which only increases when the virus crops up in other countries and then returns to the States as a much deadlier strain. Dwindling hospital staff and medical supplies are just part of Noble’s troubles. Warning the public of a pandemic isn’t easy when certain powerful people refuse to accept that influenza is a disease. Cornish’s novel has surprisingly few characters considering its scope; it clocks in at more than 750 pages. But keeping the cast manageable proves to be a great asset; it still shows the flu’s reach while concentrating on the sympathetic Noble; his wife, Lilly; and their five children. The doctor faces plenty of obstacles professionally—alerting people about the virus incites the surgeon general, who asserts that influenza is not a concern—as well as at home, where none of his loved ones are immune to the disease. Supporting characters shine, including Col. Victor Vaughn, a good friend to Noble’s late father; Akeema, the nanny treated as family; and Cmdr. Richard Cunard, Noble’s nemesis since Lilly chose Noble instead of him back at Boston University. Cornish loads his story with medical jargon. Most of it can be deciphered via context, like “roentgenograms,” which are X-ray photographs. But the surplus of terminology can be a deterrent: The dramatic punch of caring for a sickly family member is softened by cold clinical descriptions, both in the dialogue between Noble and Lilly and in the repetition and recording of vital signs (pulse, blood pressure, etc.). Regardless, Noble is an appealing, knowledgeable focal point in this fictionalized rendering of the great influenza pandemic.
Affecting characters and dramatic storytelling overcome an occasionally argot-laden plot.Pub Date: June 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482687156
Page Count: 774
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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