A wild ride with entertainers serving during WWII.
O’Connor’s historical novel highlights the “Jeep shows” that entertained soldiers during World War II.
Jim Tanzer (based on the real-life Jim Hetzer) is a song-and-dance man who enlists in the military to fight in WWII. He’s quickly assigned to the Morale Corps at Camp Sibert. “You’ll be entertaining combat soldiers in places where the USO can’t go,” his captain tells him. One of his fellow enlisted men is Mickey Rooney (who actually was in the Morale Corps during the war). They are two among a cast of more than 50 in a show called Hip Hooraythat travels to New York and London before it’s disbanded in favor of “Jeep shows,” in which teams made up of one driver and two performers are sent out in a Jeep to perform for the troops. Jim, Mickey, and their friend Wes are one such team traveling to various battlegrounds, including the Ardennes and the famed Battle of the Bulge. The action hops back and forth in time, providing readers with depictions of an 11-year-old Jimmy’s introduction to vaudeville and his relationship with his wife, Stella. It seems odd to call a World War II novel “delightful,” but that’s exactly what you get with O’Connor’s mix of history and fiction as battles rage on and enlisted men entertain the troops. The narrative covers a wide swath, from drama onboard ships to dealing with nasty weather to, of course, the travails of the injured (including Jim) and the dead during the war. It’s a fascinating look at a part of the military that many folks probably have never heard of. The characters, both real and imagined, are well drawn, and the author has a knack for dialogue that rings true. There’s also humor, thanks in no small part to Rooney’s presence. The interjection of real-life characters, particularly Rooney, isn’t jarring; in fact, it serves as a useful reminder that Jim Hetzer was a very real person. This is a compelling mix of showbiz and war, laughter and tears—a fine line that O’Connor walks well.
A wild ride with entertainers serving during WWII.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2024
ISBN: 9780990888451
Page Count: 348
Publisher: OKPI Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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