An engaging World War II novel featuring diverse prose styles about a man in search of spiritual peace and the granddaughter...
A woman leaves her dreary office life behind in search of her grandfather and his fortune.
This debut novel from veteran screenwriter Scheuring is an ambitious, sprawling literary project split between World War II and contemporary times. In the present day, Lily Allen, an overweight office drone with a penchant for Coors Light and Klondike bars, spends her days in quiet desperation, waiting for something to shake up her life. Bruce Sherwood, an heir finder, knocks on her door to do just that. She stands to inherit $16 million from her grandfather Gray Allen. The catch: Gray went missing in action during World War II, and she must track down his remains to prove he is dead in order to inherit. So Lily, with moral and financial support from Bruce, begins an adventure across the globe to find out what became of her grandfather. From the moment this mission begins, the tale becomes Gray’s story more than Lily’s. Scheuring initially leads the reader to think Gray is a violent, malevolent man during an extraordinary (indeed, almost impossible, historically speaking) journey through the Normandy invasion, the fall of Berlin, the Pacific theater, a Japanese internment camp, and the Nagasaki bombing. In a surprising turn, Lily discovers that her grandfather became some kind of quasi-Buddhist, living like a hermit in Malaysia. Gray’s saga is like a World War II fusion of Siddhartha and Apocalypse Now, with a protagonist hunting a character who found enlightenment in the darkness of war. Lily learns about Gray’s war experiences through a series of letters, interviews, and fortuitous finds. Scheuring uses each leg of Gray’s odyssey to dabble in different narrative styles: epistolary, extended monologue, stream of consciousness. The author writes in some styles better than others. Lily’s Joycean meandering would have benefitted from some extensive trimming. Scheuring’s prose about the war in the Pacific, however, is vibrant, if often digressive (“Strange thing it is to have hillsides fire at you. You return fire, but you feel like you’re fighting the earth itself”). The author displays an obvious knack for writing about battles, and the book should please military fiction fans.
An engaging World War II novel featuring diverse prose styles about a man in search of spiritual peace and the granddaughter who needs to find him.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 443
Publisher: One Light Road
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
