An unevenly executed tale of injustice, bravery, and morality.
As the Civil War wanes, a reckless Southern sailor attempts to steal Confederate treasure in Smith’s historical novel.
By 1865, Confederate Navy midshipman Yancey Arvindale is disillusioned by the war. His crew is tasked with guarding a loaded train traveling from Richmond, Virginia, to Abbeville, South Carolina, on barely functional tracks. The trip is part of the real-life historical record, but the train’s inventory and its dispersal have long been open to speculation. In this novel, Arvindale determines that the Confederate treasury belonged to no one: “If the South was beaten and the Confederacy ceased to exist, who owned it?” In breathtaking episodes, the sailor manages to offload containers filled with gold, bury them alongside the tracks, and return to the train. In another plotline, a young Black woman named Ellie has escaped the plantation where she was enslaved after she and members of her family suffered horrible abuses. While attempting to find safe passage North, she encounters friends and foes, and Smith reveals her boldness along the way. Ellie’s and Arvindale’s paths inevitably intersect. The third plotline occurs in present-day Michigan, where billionaire Jonas Arvin attempts to track the elusive source of his family’s fortune. Overall, the author’s comprehensive knowledge of the Civil War and its aftermath lends depth and texture to a high-stakes, well-paced adventure saga. Some portions of Ellie’s story comprise the book’s weakest moments, though. The author is extremely adept at telling a compelling story about a disenchanted, amoral Confederate soldier. He’s on much shakier ground when attempting to portray people of color in this setting, and some scenes lack verisimilitude. For example, Ellie, who’s been enslaved her whole life and has never witnessed a transaction involving money, realizes in her very first cash encounter that she’s being overcharged. After the overcharger uses a racist slur, Yancey asks Ellie how the term made her feel, and she blithely responds, “Aw, nothin’,” because, she says, everyone calls Black people that. Ellie also builds a successful business without any resources and kills multiple people without any repercussions. In addition, the novel’s ending feels contrived and somewhat problematic.
An unevenly executed tale of injustice, bravery, and morality.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-68-495373-6
Page Count: 293
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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