by Brent Monahan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2022
A smart and unexpectedly moving wartime drama.
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A historical novel, set during World War II, in which a German soldier seeks to escape war-torn Berlin.
Monahan’s work opens in January 1945 in the ruined German capital, where a damaged local man is wandering the rubble. Reinhardt Schmidt has been wounded, and as he recovers, he finds himself deeply disillusioned (“to the generals who never saw me,” he bitterly reflects, “my name was Cannon Fodder”). He now works in the Relocation Bureau of a city that’s been devastated by three years of relentless Allied bombings, and even as he receives a performance award from Adolf Hitler himself (whom he thinks of as a monster), Schmidt is scheming to escape the city under an assumed name before the Führer dies and the swiftly approaching Russians arrive to exact vengeance. As Monahan’s narrative unfolds, Schmidt finds that his plan is complicated by two things: the fact that his picture is taken at his award ceremony, opening up the chance that a newspaper reader will recognize him, and the fact that he’s been transferred to the Berlin police, where he’ll be under scrutiny. Schmidt hopes to swap a dead body for his living one, and use counterfeit paperwork to escape the city without alerting anyone, including cop Helmut Pfeiffer, to the scheme. There are many other variables at play, of course: Schmidt must keep a worried eye on everything from his own work schedule to the jittery rhythms of the war itself: “I needed after-work hours to create another relocation permission certificate,” he worries at one point, callously adding that he “also depended on one or two days off in case the weather cleared and another large air raid should produce a new crop of corpses.”
Monahan shapes his story with a great deal of skill and considerable, low-key eloquence, as in this passage, in which Schmidt walks with a young Jewish woman he’s known since his teens: “I followed after Ruth into the slate-shadowed city of the dead,” he writes vividly at one point. “Despite the darkness she moved with assurance, gliding through the markers and statues with the noiseless grace of a ghost.” The author also wisely makes the decision to portray his main character, who resembles an Aryan figure on a Nazi recruitment poster, as a deeply flawed and ambivalent figure. Readers will sympathize with the urge to leave a city that’s referred to as a “de facto prison,” but they’ll squirm at the main character’s amoral, by-any-means-necessary approach. Monahan’s dialogue is sharp as well, and the author allows it to carry considerable weight in the narrative. In one representative exchange, a character taunts Schmidt for his seemingly robotic attitude, which appears to lean into the Third Reich’s toxic mythology of manliness. “I have all my emotions,” he snaps back. “I'm simply trying to control them until the war ends.” It’s a mark of Monahan's narrative skill that readers can hear Schmidt’s sincerity in such moments while neither believing him nor sympathizing with him.
A smart and unexpectedly moving wartime drama.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2022
ISBN: 9798985089417
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Words Take Flight Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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by Leigh Bardugo ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 9, 2024
Lush, gorgeous, precise language and propulsive plotting sweep readers into a story as intelligent as it is atmospheric.
In 16th-century Madrid, a crypto-Jew with a talent for casting spells tries to steer clear of the Inquisition.
Luzia Cotado, a scullion and an orphan, has secrets to keep: “It was a game she and her mother had played, saying one thing and thinking another, the bits and pieces of Hebrew handed down like chipped plates.” Also handed down are “refranes”—proverbs—in “not quite Spanish, just as Luzia was not quite Spanish.” When Luzia sings the refranes, they take on power. “Aboltar cazal, aboltar mazal” (“A change of scene, a change of fortune”) can mend a torn gown or turn burnt bread into a perfect loaf; “Quien no risica, no rosica” (“Whoever doesn’t laugh, doesn’t bloom”) can summon a riot of foliage in the depths of winter. The Inquisition hangs over the story like Chekhov’s famous gun on the wall. When Luzia’s employer catches her using magic, the ambitions of both mistress and servant catapult her into fame and danger. A new, even more ambitious patron instructs his supernatural servant, Guillén Santángel, to train Luzia for a magical contest. Santángel, not Luzia, is the familiar of the title; he has been tricked into trading his freedom and luck to his master’s family in exchange for something he no longer craves but can’t give up. The novel comes up against an issue common in fantasy fiction: Why don’t the characters just use their magic to solve all their problems? Bardugo has clearly given it some thought, but her solutions aren’t quite convincing, especially toward the end of the book. These small faults would be harder to forgive if she weren’t such a beautiful writer. Part fairy tale, part political thriller, part romance, the novel unfolds like a winter tree bursting into unnatural bloom in response to one of Luzia’s refranes, as she and Santángel learn about power, trust, betrayal, and love.
Lush, gorgeous, precise language and propulsive plotting sweep readers into a story as intelligent as it is atmospheric.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781250884251
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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by Leigh Bardugo ; illustrated by Dani Pendergast
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