Realistic combat, rowdy humor, and tense adventure, all combined in a well-researched historical that’s authentic and...
Confederate naval action on the Mississippi in a sequel to Glory in the Name (2003).
Nelson’s hero, Confederate Lt. Samuel Bowater, lost his ship when the Union forces seized New Orleans, sealing off the mouth of the Mississippi. Now he and his crew are ordered to Memphis to man an ironclad being built to oppose a Union takeover of the entire river. They travel upriver on a gunboat commanded by a brawling frontiersman named Mississippi Mike Sullivan. Bowater, a cultured Charlestonian, is appalled by Sullivan and his drunken crew of river rats. But Bowater’s promised ironclad is barely half-built, and so he and his men join forces with Sullivan in raids upriver against the Union naval forces threatening Memphis. In between, Bowater helps Sullivan write a dime novel about his adventures, stealing a plot from Shakespeare. Meanwhile, back east in Norfolk, Bowater’s fiancée, Wendy Atkins, decides to travel west to join her lover. Her resourceful aunt Molly, a Confederate spy, takes Wendy under her wing to help her escape. But to find a way out of Norfolk, then under siege by the Union, they need to call in a favor from the Confederate navy, undertaking one last spy mission. With Wendy in tow, Molly brazenly poses as a Norwegian diplomat’s wife, makes her way aboard a launch carrying none other than Abraham Lincoln, and returns with the needed intelligence. In making their escape, the two arouse the ire of a Union officer who decides to capture them as the only way to redeem his honor, delaying them just enough to miss their ride out of Norfolk. The two women now find their fates bound up with that of the Virginia, the Confederate ironclad best known for its battle with the Monitor.
Realistic combat, rowdy humor, and tense adventure, all combined in a well-researched historical that’s authentic and enjoyable.Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-019970-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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