An immersive war novel that manages not to become overly depressing.
An unlikely soldier in World War I searches for his son on the Western Front in Andrews’ historical novel.
Forty-six-year-old Major Albert “Ab” Johnson, a newspaperman from Butte, Montana, recently rejoined the Army to serve his country in the Great War. He wasn’t expecting to fight, of course—he thought he was taking a safe supply job in Tours—but he’s just been summoned to Paris, where his fluency in French is needed to aid in gathering medical supplies for the scrambling American divisions on the front. Ab has barely reached the city before a German shell explodes the cafe in which he’s sitting, leaving a ringing in his ears. Ab hopes his proximity to the line might allow him to reconcile with his son Jack Johnson, who bucked family tradition by joining the Marines instead of the Army (and from whom Ab became estranged after making some anti-Marine remarks). Ab isn’t the only one acclimating to life in the combat zone: Arrogant surgeon Arthur Beck of the Navy Medical Corps, gung-ho Marine Carl Larsen, and hospital apprentice Lyle McCormack are all figuring out what exactly is expected of them in this bloody place. Little do they know, they are all headed toward the Battle of Belleau Wood, where a new chapter of Marine Corps mythology will be forged and Ab might (or might not) find redemption. Andrews captures the pain of war in muscular prose, as here when Ab speeds a bleeding soldier to an aid station: “The motorcycle bounces along the road as I race from Lucy to La Voie. I hope I don’t lose any teeth. The wounded private riding in the sidecar moans with each jolt. I’m too busy steering around the worst holes to groan with him.” Andrews clearly knows the time period—and particularly the era’s medical practices—but he largely eschews the usual tragedy of WWI narratives in favor of a more palatable adventure tale. This is one for the war buffs, and particularly those who enjoy Marine Corps lore.
An immersive war novel that manages not to become overly depressing.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798989383580
Page Count: 378
Publisher: 46 North Publications
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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