An engaging, evocative, and informative war tale that will especially appeal to Navy enthusiasts.
A Vietnam War novel focuses on a United States Navy destroyer stationed off the Gulf of Tonkin.
It is January 1966, and Navy Ensign Jon Zachery has spent his first month aboard the USSManfredin San Diego, California, the vessel’s home port. He is the newbie in the “Ensign Locker,” the tiny quarters that house five shipmates. It has been rough going for the insecure enlistee, whom readers meet as he is waiting for his wife, Teresa, to give birth to their first child. Soon enough, the chaos and fear Jon feels during Teresa’s emergency C-section are replaced by the stress and excitement of his experiences at sea. After months of offshore training, the Manfred deploys to the South Pacific. The bulk of the narrative takes place over the next six months, during which Jon copes with the overwhelming assortment of Navy regulations and procedures, deals with his angst over being apart from Teresa, gets into trouble, and finally develops into a respected leader. His slow transformation begins in the Philippines, where he scores in a chiefs-versus-officers softball game—a small victory for the ensign whose propensity for seasickness has earned him the nickname Two Buckets. Arriving in Vietnam, the Manfred takes up a position north of the DMZ, providing support for the U.S. Marines fighting the Viet Cong in the jungle. It is here that the story picks up steam with vividly described action scenes, both in the water and on land. Zerr is a Vietnam veteran with a long naval career. A minimal internet perusal of the author will confirm what readers may quickly suspect—that the novel is semiautobiographical. The first clues are the accidental, sporadic slip-ups in which the third-person narrator uses a first-person pronoun (“ ‘Aa yes hole,’ Cowboy said as he followed us out the door”). In addition, there is Zerr’s encyclopedic knowledge of the minuscule details of life aboard a military vessel. Although moment-by-moment reporting of every turn of the screw, replete with naval terminology and acronyms, becomes occasionally mind-numbing, the author’s engrossing, atmospheric portrait of the period and place brings readers directly into the Vietnam conflict.
An engaging, evocative, and informative war tale that will especially appeal to Navy enthusiasts.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-955177-40-5
Page Count: 446
Publisher: Primix Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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