A few longueurs aside, there’s enough cat and mouse here to keep Cold War thriller buffs engaged.
In his new novel, Marlantes moves from the jungles of Vietnam to the spectral tundra of a very cold Cold War–era Finland.
It’s 1947. Arnie Koski, a U.S. Army colonel, has a delicate mission: As military attaché in Finland, a tributary state to Nazi Germany during the war but now a buffer against an increasingly inimical Soviet Union, he has to keep a bunch of constituencies happy, not least the Pentagon brass. Arnie’s wartime friend, a Soviet officer named Mikhail Bobrov, is now his counterpart in Helsinki, with a different agenda but the same need for tightrope-walking skills. Their wives, Louise and Natalya, who form a careful friendship of their own, share that need, too. Louise is sometimes overwhelmed but no-nonsense, for “Army wives [are] used to getting things done alone.” The soulful, cautious Natalya’s life is more complicated still, for she lives under the doubtful eye of Oleg Sokolov, a colonel in the secret police, who monitors every step the Bobrovs take. For all that, Arnie and Mikhail hatch a friendly-wager plot to race by skis across northern Finland in February, perhaps not the smartest but certainly a suitably macho scheme. Alas—and here Marlantes’ rather relaxed narrative picks up speed—Louise and Natalya take the contest up a notch, with Louise sketching out a press release: “Two war heroes, friends and allies, making money for a joint Soviet-American orphanage project.” When, thanks to subterfuge, it actually lands in the hands of the press and the contest is widely publicized, governments get involved—and, naturally, things get ugly. Marlantes is better than Tom Clancy when it comes to the human element, but he’s similarly fascinated by militaria (“a Shpagin could fire a thousand rounds a minute”) and historical detail. All in all, it’s not John le Carré or Alan Furst, but it serves.
A few longueurs aside, there’s enough cat and mouse here to keep Cold War thriller buffs engaged.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780802161420
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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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