An exciting, high-stakes story skillfully told.
In Pugnetti’s historical WWII novel, Bjorn Erliksen goes from being a quiet, solitary farmer to a tough commando in the Norwegian resistance force.
It seems possible in 1940 that the looming war will spare Norway. Then the Germans do show up, and Bjorn vows to defend his homeland. After a rocky start, he escapes to England to become a proper commando. This will be a scary, clandestine life. One of his contacts back home turns out to be Truni Sonnesen, an old love and an emotional complication. But they are a good team and manage to sabotage a fuel depot and to assassinate a Norwegian police officer–turned-Nazi in Bergen. At length, Bjorn is arrested. Does the Gestapo really know that he is part of the resistance, or are they guessing? It doesn’t matter because he is interrogated and brutally tortured for six months. He finds reserves of stoic bravery that he never imagined. It’s a credit to Pugnetti’s imagination and research that the reader may often forget this is largely fiction and that Bjorn and Truni and others are products of the author’s imagination. And although there are many other characters, he was wise to focus so strongly on Bjorn, making it a linear narrative. There are some great and gripping scenes, as when they ride out a fierce storm in the North Sea: “Winds whistled like a hot tea kettle, rattling the wheelhouse door and demanding to be let in.” The descriptions of torture and deprivation—such as eating salted herring, head, guts, and all—are almost too much to bear, and though we hear so much (and rightly) about the Greatest Generation, readers will still be awestruck at their bravery. An afterword separates fact and fiction, an interesting, helpful perspective.
An exciting, high-stakes story skillfully told.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73759-530-4
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Legacy House Press
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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
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
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