An engaging, genre-bending tale that delivers SF action and romance.
A school project uncovers amazing coincidences and sends a teenager on an incredible adventure in this historical novel.
In 1961, Joseph Christopher Carr is a carefree 15-year-old growing up in Sagahawk on Long Island. On his way to school one morning, Joe takes a shortcut through the nearby cemetery and trips on a gravestone. After school, his teacher asks Joe to select three graves and write reports on the people buried in them. One of the graves Joe selects is for Thomas J. Harding, a captain who was lost at sea and presumed drowned in July 1951. Joe’s friend Mary Hurd lives next door to the captain’s widow, and she agrees to work with him on the project. The teens discover that the captain may have been involved in studying extraterrestrial life and that he knew Joe’s father. What started as a research project turns into a race to save humanity as Joe learns that the captain possessed encrypted documents that warn of a missile attack in October 1962. With the help of Mary, his parents, and German engineer Max Werner, Joe embarks on risky plan to warn President John F. Kennedy and avert a disaster. This latest book from Bronzo is a fast-paced historical thriller that deftly blends elements of SF with a coming-of-age tale. Joe is an amiable and well-developed protagonist. A nascent romance between Joe and Mary forms a tender subplot. The story is at its strongest when the author focuses on daily life in Sagahawk. The descriptions of Joe’s work on the family farm, the school, the leisure activities he shares with Mary, and their plans for a life together are appealing and poignant. The narrative is driven by Joe’s project and the secrets he uncovers when investigating Harding’s life. This aspect involves Roswell and possible aliens, and the SF elements of the enjoyable story offer surprising twists and turns.
An engaging, genre-bending tale that delivers SF action and romance.Pub Date: April 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4808-5253-2
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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