Anyone who hasn’t read the original Jeeves and Wooster stories should start with the master himself, but fans longing for...
Everyone and his butler thinks he can do the Wodehouse voice. They’re all wrong, but Schott’s version, a painstaking facsimile rendered in spun sugar, has its own particular charm.
From 1915 to 1974, the British humorist and immortal genius P.G. Wodehouse tickled readers’ palates with tales of the well-born, well-heeled Bertie Wooster and his unflappable valet, Jeeves. Wodehouse balanced frenetic plots with wordplay that drew its zing from the contrast between Bertie’s breeziness and Jeeves’ formality. All the elements are here in Schott’s version: country weekends with the “Aged Relative,” impersonations, taxi chases, narrow escapes across rooftops, matrimonial engagements that threaten like thunderstorms. Familiar characters stay in character: Madeline Bassett moons over daisy chains, Roderick Spode stomps around in his fascist black shorts, Uncle Tom obsesses over antique silver, and Bingo, Freddie, Barmy, Tuppy, and Catsmeat booze it up with Bertie at the Drones Club. Schott, known for his charming trivia (Schott's Quintessential Miscellany, 2011, etc.), is capable of true Wodehousian flights in lines like “From across the auditorium came a clatter of chairs and the resounding ‘thud’ of a tall man overestimating a low door” or “The majority of Dronesmen suffer from advanced cases of ergophobia—a sloth-inducing affliction that is as crippling as it is contagious. Medical Science has hitherto been reluctant to recognize ergophobia as a genuine diagnosis, but if Medical Science ever popped into the Drones Club on a weekday afternoon, then Medical Science’s bow tie would spin round and round in amazement.” But where the master’s own voice seems to burble forth as effortlessly as a gutter’s in a downpour, Schott gives the impression of infinite—if gleeful—labor. He even includes endnotes. The endnotes are a joy, as one might expect from the author of Schott’s Miscellany, but still.
Anyone who hasn’t read the original Jeeves and Wooster stories should start with the master himself, but fans longing for more will welcome Schott’s homage, which was authorized by the Wodehouse estate.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-52460-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Complex, epic, and rich in historical detail—an uplifting story of finding friendship behind enemy lines.
During World War II, five Americans head to Nazi-occupied France on a secret mission for the OSS, but only four return.
Twenty years later, OSS case officer Alistair Renault finds a clue in a history book that the missing member of their group might have survived after all. He flashes back to the beginning of the operation, when he first assembled the team he dubbed “Dragonfly”—three men and two women who were chosen for their special skills and secret connection to the war. The five recruits bond in training, but once on their mission, they split up to avoid being caught by the enemy and communicate by making marks on a mural painted on the courtyard wall of a convent. Their cover stories offer surprising glimpses of daily life for the French and their German occupiers. (And a character list at the beginning of the book helps keep their real names and aliases straight.) Christoph Brandt, a track-and-field coach who couldn’t be drafted to the American military due to his missing thumb, learns firsthand how the Hitler Youth are taught to bully. He ingratiates himself with the Nazis by tutoring the son of the head of the Abwehr German intelligence agency in France. But the Nazis won’t be fooled for long. Civil engineer Samuel “Bucky” Barton risks being discovered by Christoph’s old friend from his hometown who betrayed his country to join the Third Reich. Working side by side with the enemy, the Americans are surprised to learn that some of the Nazis are not what they seem. Tired, disillusioned, and looking for redemption, they blur the line between friend and foe, giving Dragonfly both a way into the organization and a way out of the war.
Complex, epic, and rich in historical detail—an uplifting story of finding friendship behind enemy lines.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-53873222-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
IN THE NEWS
A luminous novel about the deep value of telling stories.
Two strangers are unknowingly connected by a rare manuscript.
Maxwell Moreau, born to a pirate father and a Dominican immigrant mother in New Orleans in 1920, has a childhood in which he is surrounded by his parents’ stories. His mother, Adana Moreau, learns to read in English with Maxwell at her side. She writes a well-received science fiction novel, Lost City, but becomes gravely ill before finishing the sequel, A Model Earth; she and Maxwell burn the manuscript before she dies . The pirate travels north in search of work, and Maxwell is effectively an orphan when his father fails to meet him as planned in Chicago. Nearly 80 years later, a man named Saul is grieving the death of his grandfather, his only family after his parents were killed in a terrorist attack in Israel. Shortly before dying, his grandfather had asked Saul to mail a package for him to someone named Maxwell Moreau at a university in Chile. When the package is returned some time later, Saul takes on the task of finding Maxwell, now a well-known physicist who theorizes about parallel universes, to give him the papers inside—the same manuscript Adana Moreau had burned so many years earlier—and fulfill his grandfather’s last request. This search takes Saul and his friend Javier to New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina, and the two reflect on their friendship and Saul’s grandfather’s work as a historian as Javier documents the extensive loss of life in an effort to bear witness. Zapata’s debut novel is a wonderful merging of adventure with thoughtful but urgent meditations on time, history, and surviving tragedy. The characters are richly drawn, and the prose is striking: “They drove east, back the way they had come, and the road seemed to take on an extra-temporal quality, like they were traveling backward in time. We’re already meeting ourselves coming the other way, he thought as the Cadillac sped on and on and on.”
A luminous novel about the deep value of telling stories.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-335-01012-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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