A rousing, detailed RAF thriller that delivers an effective climax.
A historical novel set in Britain before World War II focuses on a Royal Air Force officer.
Forsyth’s main character, RAF officer Allan Chadwick, returns to England after his adventures flying Vimy bombers in Iraq during the years preceding World War II. Chadwick is now assigned to the RAF aircraft research center at Farnborough, where he’s deeply involved in hammering out the workings of early warfare radar. He’s been tasked to create an investigative team to make formal reports on all aircraft accidents in Britain (he’s placidly warned that these probes can sometimes be “a little messy”). Unbeknown to him, he’s been identified by the Luftwaffe High Command as a possible target for subornation (“Young officer, not rich, may be open to bribery or possibly a little blackmail” goes the assessment). A covert Nazi mission code-named Amalgam sends lovely young Fraulein Inge Fischer to England in the guise of a German student visiting London. Chadwick’s own storyline is further tangled when he starts a relationship with Lady Melanie Fitzgibbon, who’s involved with a secretive political group dedicated to seeking appeasement with Germany. As these threads combine and plots mature on British soil, Chadwick finds himself at the center of high stakes and a climax full of breakneck action. Forsyth writes all this with a quick, dialogue-driven tempo that will keep readers turning the pages, with the narrative concentrating on both the nuts and bolts of bomber life in 1938 and the machinations of the Nazis in Europe and the pro-German forces in England. Forsyth’s portrayal of Chadwick is nicely textured—he’s a hero but a complex one—although not much of this multidimensionality extends to the rest of the book’s cast. Still, the snappy pacing and the sly undercurrent of humor (including a running gag about Chadwick’s behemoth old Bentley) keep the whole tale moving along briskly.
A rousing, detailed RAF thriller that delivers an effective climax.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8-9853220-0-2
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Yacht Fiona Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2022
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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