Not terribly tense, and there’s more than a whiff of prewar Hollywood in the stagy dialogue. Maybe a sequel will pick up...
Fleeing Russia and rampaging Bolsheviks, a count and his son set up shop as aristotrainers in 1918 Shanghai, a city with plenty of ethnopolitical problems of its own.
Despite plenty of adjustments for today’s sensibilities and political correctness (it really was a dashed hard life for the serfs, and those coolies with their night soil—well!), old-fashioned adventure novelist Bull (the Africa-set Devil’s Oasis, 2001, etc.) can’t hide his fondness for the tsarist upper-crust, their lawn parties, their lawn dresses, their oneness with horses, their flamboyant indebtedness, and their preservation of swashbuckling, which figures heavily throughout. Young swordsman Alexander Karlov, whose semiresolved adventures suggest the opening of a new series, is at the center of things here, failing to defend his dreamy reformist mum or his twin sister Katia against brutal Leninist aristocrat eliminator Viktor Polyak who has tracked down their eastbound train, strangled mum, and absconded with sis, stopping only to crush Alexander’s leg in a door-squish maneuver before taking it on the lam. Nursed by faithful retainers and loyal White soldiers, the banged-up young Karlov limps into Shanghai with plenty of bad news for his nearly broke but still dashing father. The Karlovs are just the most recent arrivals in a flood of tsarist loyalists and revolutionary losers starting over again in the great international port. After shedding a solemn tear for the late countess, Count Karlov opens a line of credit, rents an unused opium warehouse, and sets up a riding and swordfighting shop. Young Alexander, when not helping with the new business, rescues and befriends a Chinese madam and strikes sparks with a pretty young Californian who is soft on the Soviets and about to get entangled with evil Viktor Polyak, now dragging his net along the Huangpo. Alexander must have vengeance.
Not terribly tense, and there’s more than a whiff of prewar Hollywood in the stagy dialogue. Maybe a sequel will pick up steam.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1314-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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