An often engaging war tale that struggles with awkward execution.
In Espenscheid’s (The Jackass Alliance, 2012) latest novel, a 19-year-old girl takes her brother’s place at the Civil War Battle of Shiloh, and her present-day descendant uses the story to heal her post-traumatic stress disorder.
In 1862, when Iowa farm girl Emma Mackenzie’s brother Josef deserts the Union Army, she steps in to replace him. Her tomboy habits and sharpshooting skill allow her to maintain her male disguise as the army marches south. In 2006, U.S. soldier Rita Ambridge convalesces in the hospital, angry after losing her leg in the Iraq War. Her grandmother gives her a packet of Emma’s Civil War letters and journals, and Rita, through the words of her soldier ancestor, begins to heal her own emotional scars. Emma’s story returns to center stage, and before long much of the army learns her secret—as does Elijah Robet, a Confederate soldier who meets her and falls under her spell. Emma’s commanding officer tries to keep her away from the fighting, but she ends up in the middle of the horrific Battle of Shiloh, holding her own as she sees one friend killed after another. When the Confederates take her prisoner, Robet helps her escape, and the two fall in love before they are forced to separate. Emma goes on to work in Union hospitals until she’s overwhelmed by the carnage and returns to Iowa—and her dreams of Robet. While the book’s main characters are fictional, Civil War notables such as Ulysses S. Grant, Nathan Bedford Forrest and Albert Sidney Johnston also appear. The fast-paced novel is part war story, with detailed battle scenes, and part historical romance, and it successfully weaves these two very different aspects together. The intriguing narrative, however, is hampered by unpolished prose, particularly in its overly folksy dialogue. Educated characters have a distracting inability to conjugate their verbs (“We be all on the same side here”), and phonetic spelling overwhelms one German character’s contributions (“In battle zey vill cower und run. In zuh lines, zis produce gaps, ja”).
An often engaging war tale that struggles with awkward execution.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466365582
Page Count: 404
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2013
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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