A war story that’s less about conflict that it is about emotion.
Lea offers a gripping novel about the difficult choices that soldiers face during wartime.
At the center of this novel is Anson Scott, an American volunteer who joins the British Royal Pennine Regiment in France during World War I. Scott has a secret reason for volunteering: he’s a reporter aiming to get the inside story on the war for his New York City newspaper. However, Scott doesn’t know what he’s getting into: “I told myself I was used to taking calculated risks....I was sure that I’d get through in one piece somehow. Poor bloody fool.” Scott makes a fast friend in David Alexander, an officer beloved by most in the regiment: “As he disappeared inside, there was a great roar of approval from the party.…I thought of how good it must make a man feel to have that sort of effect by simply walking into a room.” Scott takes on another secret when he falls for Alexander’s fiancee, Beatrice Tempest, a nurse. The American soon discovers that he’s not the only soldier there with secrets, and he spends the months leading up to the bloody Battle of the Somme learning about the truths behind the personnel of the Pennines. He also finds a home: “Only that evening I’d allowed myself, finally, to think I’d found a place where I fitted in.” Even those that survive that battle aren’t left unscarred, providing a bittersweet end to that chapter of Scott’s life. In this thought-provoking novel, the first in a planned series, Lea celebrates the heroism of soldiers, not the glory of war. He draws very well-developed characters that readers will care about, particularly Scott, Alexander, and Tempest. He also effectively captures the mundanity of daily life in a military camp. However, this book isn’t a work of military history: it’s a story of what soldiers will do for those they love, whether their brothers in arms or the people they left behind.
A war story that’s less about conflict that it is about emotion.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78-589018-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Matador
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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