A fun and often intriguing tale of a military man unstuck in time.
A historical fantasy novel in which a Revolutionary War–era British soldier is thrown into a time-traveling adventure.
As Modlin’s latest novel opens in April 1775, British Army Sgt. Noland Black is rallying his troops to march on Lexington and Concord in the Colony of Massachusetts in order to seize rebel stores of guns and ammunition. On the return trip to Boston, rebels swarm out of the woods, and Black is wounded and loses consciousness. When he awakens, he’s still on the ground in Concord, but 200 years have passed, and it’s historical reenactors who are trying to give him first aid. Suddenly, Noland has to deal with the unfamiliar world of 1975, including cars, modern medicine, 20th-century modes of dress. He's aggressive and depressed at first (“I should not be here,” he thinks at one point. “I know of nothing I see”), while the history buffs who found him facedown and wounded set about investigating the amazing truth of his situation. Before long, his new friends show him more of the Boston environs, including a tour of Cambridge, all of which is a somber experience for Noland, who only wants to return home: “The place from where I came, and knew quite well, no longer exists.” Over the course of this novel, Modlin tightly orchestrates a familiar time-shift story, and his decision to make his protagonist gruff and irascible rather than wide-eyed gives the work a refreshing narrative focus: Noland is shown to be a tough veteran of many skirmishes but a good man at heart, even before the shots that sent him through time. The text itself has occasional, distracting slip-ups that might have been caught with a stronger edit (such as “Identifying the shears as a weapon and instrument that could destroy his regiment coat, Sergeant Black reached swung out his good arm”). However, readers will still find the story to be a strong one that provides rock-solid entertainment.
A fun and often intriguing tale of a military man unstuck in time.Pub Date: March 15, 2023
ISBN: 9780998542720
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view.
The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies—fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain’s logbook, ink—are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship’s wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when “she” dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own “son”—Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist’s art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: “The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born—I began to suppose this—just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person.” Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, “Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?”
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18887-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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