An absorbing tale, ranging from Flanders fields to Gallipoli, in which the visceral horrors of war provide a better balance...
Perry trades the stately homes of Selbourne St. Giles for the rat-infested trenches of Flanders in this foursquare sequel to No Graves as Yet (2003).
The Reavley family, still devastated by the assassination of their parents, are now scattered as well. Judith and Joseph are in Belgium, Judith driving General Owen Cullingford’s car and falling hopelessly in love with him, Joseph serving as a chaplain who manfully dispenses comfort to the remnants of the British Expeditionary Force. Back in England, Hannah and her tykes are anxiously keeping the home fires burning for her absent husband Archie, and Matthew, working with the Secret Intelligence Service, is trying to uncover the identity of the Peacemaker, the peace-at-any-price activist on whose orders the senior Reavleys were murdered. Matthew’s assignment may sound the most deadly, but it’s Joseph who sees the most action and has to deal with the most piercing moral problems. Joseph’s troubles, already considerable because of the difficulties of persuading his wounded and shell-shocked fellow–Cambridgeshire villagers that God loves them despite everything they’ve seen and felt, are multiplied when he finds the body of Eldon Prentice, a correspondent whose pushy tactlessness had made him universally disliked—even by Gen. Cullingford, the uncle he blackmailed into giving him preferential treatment. Prentice has clearly been murdered by someone he trusted, and Joseph vows against stiff resistance to find out who. But how can he pick out the killer from a landscape that includes so many killers? And will Matthew ever identify the Peacemaker?
An absorbing tale, ranging from Flanders fields to Gallipoli, in which the visceral horrors of war provide a better balance for the plummy periods of Perry’s high-flown dialogue than Victorian England ever did (Seven Dials, 2003, etc.). Be warned, though: She’s evidently saving the Peacemaker’s identity for the third, or the thirteenth, entry in this new series.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-45654-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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