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
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
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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