Another crowd-pleasing, if somewhat wooden, tale of steely heroism and stiff-upper-lip bravado from the prolific Higgins. Returning to the WWII settings that he knows so well, Higgins (The President’s Daughter, 1997, etc.) puts a pair of identical twin flyboys, one American, one German, on opposite sides of the war. The story begins in 1997 in Cold Harbour, a lonely Cornish village—and once a secret spy base—where the real Higgins and his real wife Denise find themselves after surviving a crash-landing in the English Channel. There, Zee Aeland, a crusty innkeeper, turns emotional when he glimpses Higgins’s teddy bear Tarquin, which the author purchased in an antique shop. Aeland tells him that Tarquin’s original owner was dashing Jack Kelso, a wealthy, thrill-seeking American vet who fought for the British before the US entered the war. Recovering from a crash- landing of his own in France, Kelso met and married his hospital nurse, the impoverished German baroness Elsa von Halder, who later—after her husband insisted on returning to the States—gave birth to twin sons Max and Harry. Because he was ten minutes older, Max also became the new Baron von Halder. Then, in 1930, Jack died, and took Max to his ancestral homeland, while Harry stayed in Boston with his rich grandfather, brooding, and finally taking Tarquin with him to fight for Finland against invading Russians. By page 60, Harry has joined the RAF (as a Finn!), and Max, a.k.a. “The Black Baron,” is clicking his boots among the Nazis. Using the two boys to show that ineffable daring, chivalric nonchalance, and the ability to execute a flawless Immelmann turn can transcend political borders and ideologies (both Max and Elsa rapidly develop sour opinions about Hitler). Women, spies, tyrants and combat buddies come and go, but teddy bears, brotherly love, and a tearjerker conclusion win out. An old-fashioned, sentimental ode to chivalric virtue and family values: Not as suspenseful as Higgins’s best, but well grounded in historical detail, lightened by amusing encounters with Hitler, Himmler, and other factual fiends. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: May 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14376-9
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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