Miller is in fine form here, mixing an unforgettable cat-and-mouse chase with a moving love story.
A British cavalry officer fleeing traumatic memories seeks solace on a Scottish island, but his new refuge may not be remote enough to let him escape a dangerous enemy.
When Capt. John Lacroix returns from the Napoleonic wars in Spain to his Somerset estate, he is broken in body and spirit. It is 1809, and the evacuation of retreating British forces from the port of Corunna is a humiliating defeat. “None of this has the look of victory,” says the doctor treating him. As Nell, the housekeeper, tends his wounds, Lacroix slowly heals physically. But he refuses to talk about his battlefield experiences, saying only, “The war was very hard on horses, Nell.” When he receives orders to return to his regiment, the young man decides to flee, embarking on a journey north to the remote Hebrides, where he will find healing and love with the free-thinking Emily Frend. Traveling under an assumed name, Lacroix is unaware that Cpl. Calley and Lt. Medina, two soldiers, are in pursuit with secret orders to kill him. Calley, who identified Lacroix as the officer responsible for an atrocity in a Spanish village, is remorseless in his hunt. By alternating the narrative between Lacroix and his pursuers, Miller (The Crossing, 2017, etc.) effectively ratchets up the tension and suspense. With a less-skilled writer, naming characters after the officers and soldiers charged in the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam could have come across as a ham-fisted approach, but it’s appropriately chilling in this melancholy portrait of war, culpability, and redemption. The luscious prose (“the mud was liquid clay”) adds to the mood, and Miller’s precise historical details (a horn spoon tucked into an apron pocket) feel organic and real; the author keeps his research well hidden. The dazzling, ambiguous ending will fodder plenty of book-club debate.
Miller is in fine form here, mixing an unforgettable cat-and-mouse chase with a moving love story.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60945-543-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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