A decidedly clever and well-written flight of fancy starring a literary legend.
This epistolary novel explores whether F. Scott Fitzgerald really was recruited to assassinate Marshal Philippe Pétain in 1940.
Henri Duval is a double agent. His public persona is that of a functionary of the despicable Vichy government in France; in reality, he is working for the Resistance, which often gets him into embarrassing and dangerous situations. He is also supposed to be a Hollywood screenwriter, a guise that enables him to meet and befriend Fitzgerald, now pretty much washed up and rarely sober despite the anxious ministrations of his mistress, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. Eventually, Henri and Fitzgerald make it to Vichy and are granted an audience with Pétain, but it is no spoiler to say that the assassination is badly bungled (or readers surely would have heard about it). All the trappings are here: the serendipitous discovery of a locked trunk in an estate sale; the existence of silent confederate Hyman Skolski (the recipient of Henri’s fevered letters); the breaking of the code they devised; and the fact that Pétain is a big fan of Fitzgerald and the Roaring ’20s (who knew?). All this is framed with an introduction written by a distinguished Princeton historian who even provides footnotes from time to time. Because this witty novel is in a historical setting, Sinclair can, for example, have Henri stumble on the Marx brothers at their most manic (“I can’t make sense of them, but they’re very nice fellows. They enjoyed themselves immensely making fun of my heavy French accent”). Later, the double agent falls hard for a mysterious woman on the Santa Monica beach only to discover that she, too, is a famous, real-life Hollywood mistress. The author does a fine job with Fitzgerald: vain and impulsive, somehow both childish and childlike, and a real challenge for Henri to handle. Henri himself is a wonderful creation. From the first, he is disdainful of these Americans, especially the Los Angeles subspecies. A man can’t find decent food or wine here, he wails, and the vaunted movies are clichéd and trashy. But of course, he softens to the point that (Zut alors!) he is only bemused by, not contemptuous of, these Americans, though he stops short of becoming a baseball fan.
A decidedly clever and well-written flight of fancy starring a literary legend.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2023
ISBN: 979-8-9868261-0-3
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Eclectic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
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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