Good for smiles and chuckles until war becomes more real.
The Blitz is on, and Britain must protect its precious symbol.
With his nation in peril in 1939, Winston Churchill concocts a scheme to protect the crown jewels: transport them to a submarine that will whisk them off to the safety of Canada. He recruits Hector, Lord Neville-Percy of Marlton, and police constable Caitrin Colline, a “Welsh firebrand, antiroyalist, and future destroyer of England’s aristocracy,” to act as a squabbling married couple driving a hay wagon. While this may not have been one of Winnie’s better ideas, he certainly finds two people with clashing backgrounds and personalities. (In reality, the jewels were buried on British soil.) The book is an oddity for a World War II novel. It’s funny and filled with witty dialogue, coming mostly from Caitrin. To each other, they are Hecky and Catty. When anyone asks what they’re carrying in the hay wagon, she answers the crown jewels, correctly expecting not to be believed. Some people they meet are not even convinced that they’re married. And they must deal with Die Brücke—The Bridge—whose members wish the English could just get along with Hitler. Violence is a long time coming in this novel, and for a while the humor carries more weight than the plot. But sometimes the interchanges cross into plain silliness: “‘…a horse box full of hay bales that no one is allowed to see. Tip-top secret, no?’ ‘Yes,’ Caitrin [replies.] ‘The hushest of all hushedy-hushes.’” The exchanges between Hector and Caitrin show off many of the class differences between them. Caitrin would just as soon expropriate all the aristocrats’ property and tell them to go get jobs like everybody else. Hector is defensive about his class, saying hey, don’t blame me for the circumstances I was born into. Eventually there is bloodletting—this is war—and Caitrin acquits herself as a woman you wouldn’t care to mess with. Meanwhile, they remain well aware of the scourge of the Nazi bombers pummeling England. So the big question is whether they will make it to the submarine or end up somewhere they’d never imagine.
Good for smiles and chuckles until war becomes more real.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781496749093
Page Count: 304
Publisher: John Scognamiglio Books/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
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
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.
Following the mysterious disappearance of his wife, a struggling London novelist journeys to a remote Scottish island to try to get his mojo back—but all, of course, is not what it seems.
Grady Green hits the pinnacle of his publishing career on the same night that his life goes off the rails—first his book lands on the New York Times bestseller list, and then his wife, Abby, goes missing on her way home. A year later, Grady is a mere shadow of his former self: out of money and out of ideas. So, when his agent, Abby’s godmother, suggests that he spend some time on the Isle of Amberly, in a log cabin left to her by one of her writers, it seems as good a plan as any. With free housing for himself and his dog and a beautiful, distraction-free environment, maybe he can finally complete the next novel. But from the very beginning, Grady’s experiences with Amberly seem weird, if not downright ominous: As a visitor, he’s not allowed to bring his car onto the island; the local businesses are only open for a few hours at a time; and there are no birds. At all. Not to mention the skeletal hand he finds buried under the floorboards of the cabin, the creepy harmonica music in the woods, and the occasional sighting of a woman in a red coat who’s a dead ringer for Abby. As Grady falls deeper and deeper into insomnia and alcoholism, he begins to realize his being on the island is no accident—and that should make him very afraid. Through occasional chapters from before Abby’s disappearance, told from her point of view, we learn that Grady is not necessarily a reliable narrator, and the book’s slow unfolding of dread, mystery, and then truth is both creative and well-paced. Every chapter heading is an oxymoron, like the title, reminding us of the contradictions at the heart of every story.
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781250337788
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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