An entertaining adventure that’s packed with diverse and intriguing historical morsels.
When an illustrious British spy receives a message from the queen of France requesting his assistance in matters critical to the court, he and his oldest daughter head to Paris.
This third volume in West’s enticing adventure series opens with a rousing sea escapade in which Sir Anthony Standen and his oldest daughter, Maria, find themselves battling a two-vessel fleet of Barbary pirates. Fans of all things nautical should thoroughly enjoy the high-action scenes as well as the many pages devoted to the exquisitely detailed descriptions of the innovations installed on the Standens’ newly launched sailboat. But by January 1610, Anthony is happily settled back on his Italian vineyard estate with his wife, Francesca, and their five children—20-year-old twins Maria and Antonio and youngsters William, Anna, and baby Catherine. Anthony has been instructing the twins—and readers who have a fondness for puzzles—in the arts of lock-picking and cryptanalysis, tools of his trade as a spy. A knock on the door brings a dispatch rider with a letter from Marie, Queen of France. The young dauphin, Louis, is struggling with a debilitating stutter. The court doctors, Marie writes, are considering amputating a portion of the child’s tongue to alleviate the problem. Can Anthony help the future king? But Anthony realizes that the missive also contains a secret code revealing a much more serious issue—somebody wants Marie’s husband, King Henry, dead (“Help we are in danger, foe within court”). Francesca suggests Anthony bring Maria with him to Paris, where she hopes he will find their spirited daughter a suitable husband—a prospect that the young woman is loath to consider. And so, father and daughter are off to the Louvre Palace. The pace of the narrative slows as the tale becomes an investigative procedural. Still, the story is filled with captivating historical digressions and, more compellingly, the rich intricacies of palace politics, jealousies, and ambitions. There are enough suspects among the queen’s most trusted advisers to keep readers guessing until the final pages. And Maria, who is given a prominent role in this installment, emerges as a sturdy, feminist protagonist.
An entertaining adventure that’s packed with diverse and intriguing historical morsels.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-915225-05-4
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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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