A gritty, action-packed, but uneven war tale.
In this historical novel, an American soldier braves the perils of World War I in France and falls in love with a nurse.
Sam McCormick tragically loses both his parents when the Lusitania is sunk by a German U-boat; they were sailing to England to visit relatives. Hungry for vengeance, he joins the National Guard in 1916 in Wellsville, Ohio, and soon finds himself on the war’s front lines in France, an infantryman who is part of the Rainbow Division. Now a sergeant, Sam is repeatedly exposed to the “terrifying trip into hell” that is combat and the despairing “orgy of death” that is war. He suffers multiple gunshot wounds and a mustard gas attack and twice finds himself sent to a field hospital. The first time, he meets beautiful French nurse Marie Petit and all but instantly falls in love with her. They maintain an epistolary romance conducted under the bleak specter of the war’s uncertainty. In this series opener, Freeland deftly captures the reality of the “life of a front-line doughboy” and the nearly indescribable grimness of a war that seemed interminable. The author clearly aims for literal realism—depicting a field hospital in Château-Thierry, he evokes “the odor of dead and decaying men” as well as the moans and cries of frightened, desolate soldiers. In addition, the plot marches along at a relentless pace—Sam sees plenty of action, with his military adventures culminating in the “monumental battle of the Meuse-Argonne.” But this is a familiar story that rarely departs from the formulas of the genre. For readers with even a cursory knowledge of novels depicting modern wars, there is not much that’s original here. Moreover, the author’s writing is sometimes bland, and the book strikes an earnest, sentimental tone. At one point, musing about Marie, the protagonist thinks: “I’ve never felt this way about a woman before and have no idea how to deal with my feelings. This is not going to be easy!”
A gritty, action-packed, but uneven war tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-954000-40-7
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Publish Authority
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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