The author’s love of 19th-century detail almost buries what should be a vivid adventure tale. Like the wines his characters...
The 19th-century adventures of Captain Matthew Hervey continue as our dashing hero, on a spying mission to India, tangles with bloodthirsty Pindaree raiders, conniving agents of the British East India company, a righteous rajah, and a wild, crashing boar.
Introduced in A Close Run Thing (1999) as a land-based rendition of Patrick O’Brian’s British seafaring Aubrey-Maturin series, Mallinson’s Hervey is a handsome, veddy British cavalry officer in his early 20s whose solid education, gift with languages, and sword-flashing fearlessness atop his faithful steed Jessye, is offset only by a youthful clumsiness: in an early episode here, Hervey knocks himself out when he charges valiantly into a French building and bangs his head on a ceiling beam. He is appropriately timid with women (an aristocratic English lass awaits his return) and also has a healthy conscience: it depresses him to see poor peasants brutally disemboweled, or brave soldiers tortured and mutilated because they happened to be on the losing side. Now, having been made aide-to-camp to the Duke of Wellington after running a crucial mission at Waterloo, Hervey is sent to India to observe the famed Bengal lancers, with instructions to spy on operations of the British East India Company and to destroy evidence of the Duke’s ownership of some politically incorrect income-producing estates. The India Hervey encounters is a dangerously exotic refuge for numerous English misfits seeking to plunder and pleasure their way across the subcontinent. Like the elephant that Hervey rescues from quicksand (thereby endearing himself to the wily Rajah of Chintal), Mallinson mires his hero in discursive mealtime dialogue about cultural and military tedium, then pulls him out at the last minute to hunt boar or help the rajah dispose of his enemies. Action scenes, when they arrive, are expertly detailed, with Mallinson describing battlefield tactics and military uniforms down to the button.
The author’s love of 19th-century detail almost buries what should be a vivid adventure tale. Like the wines his characters so frequently quaff, though, this series will improve with age.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-553-11134-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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