Readers will enjoy this first-rate naval fiction.
An ambitious naval ensign and his girlfriend wake up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
“I love being at sea,” muses young Scott Bradley James. “I could live forever out here.” So he attends the Naval Academy, graduating in 1941. The story proceeds at an unhurried pace as it develops a decent but far from perfect man. Scott scrapes together the money for his girlfriend’s illegal abortion, from which she dies. The academy tests the honesty and honor he had thought were at his core. A cheating scandal erupts; though guilty, he’s not caught. Both events weigh heavily on his conscience as he begins his naval career. In Hawaii, a woman nicknamed Kai enters his life as an integral part of the tale. In bed with her, he’s technically AWOL when Japanese fighters attack Pearl Harbor, but he’s close enough to race back to his crippled ship, the USS West Virginia, as the fight rages. Afterward, ambition, guilt, and jealousy gnaw at his soul, though he keeps the latter in check. Still, goddamn it, other people are getting the medals—like Chief Petty Officer John Finn, who earns a Medal of Honor—and not him? “It’s like I wasn’t even there,” he thinks. He wants to be “in the center of the inferno.” But he grows with his duties at sea and begins to show his mettle. Meanwhile, his relationship with Kai is on the brink of falling apart because he’s gone so long and writes her only infrequently. Will she wait for him? Because a war is on, no one can plan ahead. A Marine might step on a land mine and alter the trajectory of his friends’ lives far into the future. There is an interesting mix of fictional and historical characters: Scott and Kai are imagined, while the admirals and John Finn are not. (That hero was badly wounded at Pearl Harbor but lived to age 100.) Stavridis’ own love of the Navy (where he’s a retired admiral) shows well on these pages as he weaves war with the “career and personal voyage of Scott Bradley James.” The ending leaves an uncertain future, as the war is far from finished, and the author plans a sequel.
Readers will enjoy this first-rate naval fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9780593494073
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
