by Arturo Pérez-Reverte & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 2, 2010
First-rate entertainment, from one of the masters.
Heaving bosoms and hyperbolic derring-do abound in this sixth volume of the acclaimed Spanish author’s series of period swashbucklers (The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet, 2009, etc.).
It’s announced as “the final installment” in the saga of freelance soldier of fortune Captain Alatriste and his page turned foster son and companion Íñigo Balboa (imagine Sancho Panza in flaming youth, eager to emulate his master Don Quixote’s glamorous and amorous exploits). Final installment? Well, we all know what happened the first time Conan Doyle tried to off Sherlock Holmes, don’t we? Be that as it may, Pérez-Reverte treats us to another rousing adventure firmly in the tradition of modern romancer Rafael Sabatini channeling the immortal Alexandre Dumas. Once again, Íñigo narrates, in old age, remembering. The story records their deeds as mercenary soldiers aboard a Spanish galleon on a perilous mission that will culminate in a savage battle at sea, traveling from Naples through the eastern Mediterranean to Morocco and Algeria, thence Venice, and eventually Malta. Alatriste attempts to rescue an old friend; Íñigo, itching to attain full maturity (he has survived to the age of 17), writhes in the coils of his infatuation with beautiful Angélica, the niece of Alatriste’s old enemy—and either a paragon of burgeoning womanhood or a homicidal vixen leading the impulsive Íñigo to his doom. The action feels a bit generic, but the nicely timed introductions of savory and unsavory supporting characters keeps the reader hooked. (Pérez-Reverte even invents his own Gunga Din—resourceful Moorish manservant Gurriat.) The mix is further enriched by an autumnal sense of the waste and folly—and inevitability—of men’s compulsion to go to war.
First-rate entertainment, from one of the masters.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-399-15664-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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BOOK REVIEW
by Arturo Pérez-Reverte ; translated by Frank Wynne
BOOK REVIEW
by Arturo Pérez-Reverte and translated by Margaret Jull Costa
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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