A carefully researched and accessible novel about a pivotal operation in postwar Germany.
Schrader continues her dramatization of the Berlin Airlift in this sequel.
During the 15-month operation from the spring of 1948 to the summer of ’49, Allied aircraft dropped millions of tons of food and fuel into West Germany after the Soviet Union blocked shipping by rail and by sea. British Journalist Virginia Cox-Gordon, one of the many characters in this follow-up to Cold Peace (2023), thinks of the operation as “the Western Allies’ hopeless plan to supply the entire civilian population of Berlin by air” and as the most important news story since Germany’s surrender. Virginia and other characters return from Cold Peace, and new players are introduced as the Berlin operation complicates the lives of members of the Royal Air Force, the U.S. Air Force, Emergency Air Services, the Berlin city government, and Berlin’s civilian population, who are living under a new dictatorship as Josef Stalin’s grip tightens. The novel covers a few months of the operation, and by making use of the large cast, Schrader is able to take readers into virtually every aspect of the drama, including the experiences of ordinary Germans and their representatives, such as city councilor Jakob Liebherr (“a glance at his surroundings reminded him of just how important hope was”), and those of the flyers, who risk their lives in the continuous air missions and also note how the world is changing. Even Soviet personnel feel the same: “All the good men,” one reflects, “the men who fought the war, are being replaced by party hacks, by NKVD stooges.”
The size of Schrader’s cast may be especially daunting for readers coming to this book without having read the first in the series. However, she effectively overcomes this element of intimidation in several well-deployed ways. She peppers her cast with intriguing characters, including Women’s Auxiliary Air Force Cpl. Galyna Borisenko, a Soviet-born Ukrainian who’s now a British citizen but still very much in alien territory, and wing commander and Battle of Britain veteran Robert Priestman, who bravely continues the airlift even in the face of a Soviet takeover of the entire city: “If I can help save 17,000 civilians—the bulk of them children—from Stalin, then I will,” he declares at one point. “It’s the moral equivalent of going down fighting.” Priestman also notes the emergence of a new world in which the British Empire “could no longer shower largesse upon the poor of the world as America could.” The most colorful aspect of the Berlin Airlift—when planes delivered candies to the children of the city—is in many ways the dramatic centerpiece of this novel. The whimsical happiness of these “candy drops” helps to counterbalance the novel’s unfortunate penchant for delivering large blocks of exposition. Also, as in many wartime stories, several members of the cast feel more like familiar types than fully developed characters. Still, the power of the book is in how a true sense of humanity prevails.
A carefully researched and accessible novel about a pivotal operation in postwar Germany.Pub Date: May 15, 2024
ISBN: 9798987177020
Page Count: 516
Publisher: Cross Seas Press
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.
On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.
When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593875551
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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