A historically informative but also entertaining novel.
In Ashby’s historical novel, a Black British officer—a formerly enslaved person—is sent undercover in preparation for the monumental Battle of New Orleans.
In 1814, Maj. Alexander Charteris, British Adjutant of His Majesty’s 1st West India Regiment of Foot, leads a West Indian regiment of soldiers against the Americans in Washington, D.C. and watches with some satisfaction as the White House is engulfed in flames. Immediately after, Charteris is tasked with a clandestine mission of immense importance, he will travel to New Orleans, posing as a “gens de couleur libre” (“free people of color”) refugee to gather military intelligence and foment rebellion among the considerable Black population there. The British plan is to take New Orleans, permitting them to effectively block the westward expansion of the nation and hamper its growth into a rival empire. Charteris is perfect for the job—a Black man born in Grenada, he speaks fluent French, as does his aide on the mission, Sgt. Major Sori, who was also formerly enslaved. The task is a perilous one and has a personal dimension: Julien Fédon, the leader of a violent uprising in Grenada from 1795 to 1796—and the man who once enslaved Charteris—is living in New Orleans under an assumed name. Charteris’ contact in New Orleans is Jocasta Cameron, described as a “hard-edged businesswoman” and a “lascivious courtesan.” Further complicating matters, he begins to fall in love with her and discovers that she’s enslaved by Fédon.
Ashby’s command of the historical material is authoritative—he brings to life the politics and culture of the times and vividly portrays the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, one of the worst defeats the British military suffered in the 19th century. Charteris is a unique protagonist who knows what it’s like to be enslaved and the son of an aristocrat—his father was an English baronet, and Charteris was given an education befitting his pedigree. Experiencing extraordinary racism has left him both cynical and filled with an “omnipresent despair,” a complex psychological profile deftly drawn by the author: He is an “outcast, forever caught between two worlds because of the stigma of his mixed race.” Ashby’s writing can be overwrought and sentimental—he sometimes hits notes a touch formulaic and more than a touch melodramatic, as when Jocasta fears permitting herself to be emotionally vulnerable to any man, and she expresses her trepidation about her feelings for Charteris: “I can’t, cannot, fall for this man…When he leaves, as he will, it will just be one more ache to add to the shards of my heart that I have glued together like a shattered porcelain plate. No man can help me; I can only fend for myself if I am to rescue the one person deserving of my love.” Likewise, the author describes their lovemaking as “as much a melding of beleaguered hearts and minds as a rapturous connection of their bodies.” Fortunately, these stylistic missteps don’t keep the novel from being thoroughly enjoyable.
Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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