An engrossing tale about British expatriates in India during a tumultuous political time, well-suited for fans of Indian...
In this debut historical novel, a British woman living in India with her family in the 1850s struggles to find love.
George opens her tale as Edwina Hardingham is visiting her sister, Katherine, in Calcutta. Edwina has traveled from Simla, an area in the hills where she lives with her parents, to be present for the birth of her sister’s child. When Edwina makes a brief visit to the home of Indian friends in Calcutta, she and her servant are attacked by a band of thieves. Edwina fears for her life, but a lone man appears to thwart the assault. After chasing off the bandits, the man introduces himself as William Grayson and escorts Edwina back to Katherine’s. Before long, Edwina must return home. She finds herself infatuated with Grayson, and is delighted when he appears in Simla. As they grow better acquainted, Grayson quickly disappoints Edwina, displaying a fickle nature that extinguishes her affection for him. But his shortcomings highlight the positive attributes of another man she has just met in Simla, James Henry Davenport. Unfortunately, Davenport believes Edwina has eyes only for Grayson. Worse yet, before she can reveal her feelings for Davenport, he is whisked away to fight against the Indian insurrection that has begun sweeping through the country. With a sudden shift in tone, the book pauses its focus on courtship and becomes an action-packed war chronicle, deftly detailing Davenport’s attempts to battle the Indian rebels and locate his sister, whom he believes to be at risk in light of the general political unrest in India. Although the book contains two vastly different sections, perhaps attempting to accomplish too much in one volume, both stories are absorbing, and the author ultimately weaves everything together in the end. This well-researched tale illustrates the cultural and political divide that pervaded India in the mid-19th century. In a narrative voice that conjures both Jane Austen and Erich Maria Remarque, George provides intriguing and thorough details about the Indian revolt against British rule in the 1850s.
An engrossing tale about British expatriates in India during a tumultuous political time, well-suited for fans of Indian history and Victorian literature.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73226-981-1
Page Count: 307
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
A super-exorcism that leaves the taste of somebody else's blood in your mouth and what a bad taste it is. King presents us with the riddle of a small Maine town that has been deserted overnight. Where did all the down-Easters go? Matter of fact, they're still there but they only get up at sundown. . . for a warm drink. . . .Ben Mears, a novelist, returns to Salem's Lot (pop. 1319), the hometown he hasn't seen since he was four years old, where he falls for a young painter who admires his books (what happens to her shouldn't happen to a Martian). Odd things are manifested. Someone rents the ghastly old Marsten mansion, closed since a horrible double murder-suicide in 1939; a dog is found impaled on a spiked fence; a healthy boy dies of anemia in one week and his brother vanishes. Ben displays tremendous calm considering that you're left to face a corpse that sits up after an autopsy and sinks its fangs into the coroner's neck. . . . Vampirism, necrophilia, et dreadful alia rather overplayed by the author of Carrie (1974).
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1975
ISBN: 0385007515
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
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