An informative and adventurous story of a wayward journey into another world.
A Silicon Valley programmer leaves his job to ride the rails with an elderly man in Davis’ novel.
At 26, Lynden Hoover has a fine career at Data Dynamics, a hot San Francisco Bay Area tech company. However, he starts to feel that his success is like a prison, and it’s one that he wants to escape: “All programmers were a little crazy up front,” he notes, “and all the good ones knew when to bail.” In sixth grade, he’d jumped on a freight train to search for his absent father, and he wants to roam free once again. It’s now the 1980s, and open boxcars abound, so Lynden hops on one of them and heads east. Along the way, he meets The Duke, an old-fashioned tramp who carries with him the language and customs of the past: “You fight like a punch-drunk Palooka,” he tells Lynden after one squabble. The Duke turns out to have a wealth of information about the locations of “hobo” camps, and he has dirt regarding dangerous characters. Of particular concern is Short Arm, a villainous scoundrel that The Duke claims will kill him on sight. Lynden, now dubbed “Frisco,” and The Duke roll past Reno, the Great Salt Lake, and Grand Junction, and The Duke says that Short Arm is headed to Pennsylvania. But Lynden has a secret that’s tormenting him—one that will bring him even deeper into a dangerous, transient world. Over the course of this novel, Davis presents readers with an adventure that also works well as a tribute to the past, effectively using the perspective of a young character to capture what feels like the last glimpse of a disappearing culture. Lynden’s interest in riding the rails isn’t merely a passing fancy, and the history that connects The Duke and Lynden brings up issues as varied as wanderlust, economics, and sexuality. The characters come across as convincing, real people, and the schemes that they hatch are generally fun. Although the first half of the novel suffers from a general talkiness and aimlessness, the second half establishes a much more clearly defined narrative that will engage readers.
An informative and adventurous story of a wayward journey into another world.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-951122-25-6
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Artemesia Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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