A compelling and historically sound tale that follows a Union spy.
A Civil War–era thriller that revolves around espionage and romance.
Despite Canada’s professed neutrality during the Civil War, Confederate spies used it as a safe refuge from which to conduct their operations. Raiford Young, a Union soldier, is tasked with going undercover to gather intelligence about their plans and movements. In New York, his hotel is set ablaze by Lt. John William Headley, a Confederate agent, and Raiford rushes to save a family trapped by the encircling fire. He manages to rescue the two young children, Beatrice and Frederick Cutter, but their father dies. A young woman, Anathea Brannaman, helps Raiford, and the two of them decide to transport the children into the care of their grandparents, who live in Guelph, Ontario. Raiford quickly realizes that traveling with a family provides a perfect cover for his covert mission. Once in Canada, he must contend with foiling dangerous plots meant to compel President Abraham Lincoln into peace talks and concessions. This is the author’s fifth novel, all of them set during the Civil War. Stoddard Schofield (Savannah Bound, 2014, etc.), a trained librarian and archivist, artfully combines events and people both real and imagined in this volume. Her research is remarkably thorough and painstaking. In addition, the plot propels itself like a cannon shot, maintaining a fleet pace from start to finish. Nevertheless, the highlight of the work is the sensitive and nuanced characterization; both Raiford and Anathea contend with past heartache and struggle to resolve their internal conflicts in order to accept their attraction to each other. Raiford’s wife died just three months after they were wed, and Anathea, who grew up an orphan, flees from a cold, abusive husband who dominated her life. Sometimes, the dialogue can be a touch leaden and overly earnest. Raiford wonders aloud to himself, “Heavenly Father, you know how I grieved when she died. You don’t want me to endure that again, do you?” And the historical summaries that the author provides, breaking from the narrator’s voice, are more intrusive than edifying. Despite these minor missteps, the book is an entertaining, and sometimes affecting, fusion of fiction and history.
A compelling and historically sound tale that follows a Union spy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5049-8023-4
Page Count: 296
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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