A wonkish but rousing fantasia.
A female airship pilot battles an evil industrialist, a Prussian militarist, and a sexist society in this debut steampunk adventure.
In 1896, after Heinz Amstel, a German engineer and businessman in Joplin, Missouri, turns up dead—electrocuted and torn apart by coyotes—his widow, Evaline, known as “Evvy,” is left with a mountain of debt; custody of young Bettina, Heinz’s daughter by another woman; and the bankrupt remnants of Heinz’s airship company, which offers paying customers the best airborne experience that money can buy. She duly learns to fly the dirigibles herself, and she becomes famous when she pilots a group of Baptists and a newspaperman through a tornado to a safe landing. Unfortunately, Evvy is shadowed by minions of Prussian Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, who claims that his stolen designs were the basis for the superairship that Heinz was secretly building, The Empress of the Clouds. She’s also stalked by Georgia tycoon Erasmus Marchand, who’s planning to fit Empress with a death ray and overthrow the government by zapping President William McKinley’s inauguration from the sky; his new regime, he says, will simultaneously reinstitute slavery and establish a Jewish national homeland in the United States. Evvy’s quest to thwart the various plots, assisted by chivalrous deputy Sean McTavish, leads her into ever more dangerous scrapes, all heading toward a rare dirigible dogfight. Ultican’s period fantasy is all about the newfangled gear. Evvy is a STEM-focused heroine who’s endlessly inquisitive about horseless carriages, electric dynamos, fluorescent goggles, and other marvels, forever flummoxing patronizing men with her knowledge and skill. The narrative sometimes drifts like a giant balloon, and the characters’ schemes and motivations aren’t always plausible. But Ultican’s straightforward prose makes the science and engineering interesting and the action scenes gripping: “The girders twisted and snapped, emitting unearthly high-pitched tones as heavy bolts and metal beams hurtled through the atmosphere, scattering the terrified onlookers who now desperately sought to escape.” Readers who love derring-do with charismatic, old-school technology will find this a diverting read.
A wonkish but rousing fantasia.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-65525-866-4
Page Count: 365
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.
The miseries of the Depression and Dust Bowl years shape the destiny of a Texas family.
“Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times in my journey when I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her 25th birthday, and wind up with her in California in 1936 in a saga of almost unrelieved woe. Despised by her shallow parents and sisters for being sickly and unattractive—“too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself”—Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single night of abandon leads to pregnancy and forced marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. Though she finds some joy working the land, tending the animals, and learning her way around Mama Rose's kitchen, her marriage is never happy, the pleasures of early motherhood are brief, and soon the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all the farmers of the area to despair and starvation. Elsa's search for a better life for her children takes them out west to California, where things turn out to be even worse. While she never overcomes her low self-esteem about her looks, Elsa displays an iron core of character and courage as she faces dust storms, floods, hunger riots, homelessness, poverty, the misery of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and more. The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions.
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2501-7860-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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