Who is Sharpe's enemy? That's one of the twists in this fifth Peninsular War maneuver for soldier-hero Richard Sharpe: another jaunty blend of cannons, derring-do, and personality. It's now December 1812—and a Portuguese village has been raped and massacred by a vile, red-coated mini-army of British and French deserters. (Bad PR for the British.) Furthermore, this brigade—led by a former French cook and Sharpe's old nemesis Hakeswill—has seized control of a castle/convent complex on the Portuguese border, taking several multinational hostages. . . including the Spanish bride of Colonel Sir Augustus Farthingdale. So who will rescue them? Sharpe, of course (now a Major!), since he happens to be in nearby Spain, testing some experimental military-rockets for General Nairn. His initial Anglo-French attempt to ransom the hostages fails. Then Sharpe leads a special troop (including the Royal American Rifles) to an assault on the castle—first rescuing the hostages (Lady Farthingdale turns out to be Sharpe's old flame, whore Josefina!), then battling the brigands for control of the whole area. But, though there's been an Anglo-French truce during this anti-terrorist action, Sharpe is now suspicious of his temporary "allies"; buffoonish Lord Farthingdale, however, insists on maintaining the truce. Thus, Sharpe must eventually blackmail Farthingdale (the Josefina secret) into turning over command: Sharpe can then defend the crucially located castle from a huge French invasion. (His last-ditch secret weapon? Those above-mentioned rockets, naturally.) And the final fray brings victory, the long-delayed demise of unkillable Hakeswill. . . and tragedy too, alas: Sharpe's wife Teresa, a Spanish partisan-leader, will be one of the unintended fatalities. Some anachronistic repartee, some excessively grisly torture—but, as before, Cornwell manages to add spice and tension to the more standard barrage of tactics, musketry, and explosions.
Pub Date: March 1, 1983
ISBN: 0140294341
Page Count: 247
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1983
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
