A swashbuckling and often surprising novel of Risorgimento Italy.
In Shore’s debut historical novel, two men from a famous family prove their worth in the battles of 19th-century Italy.
At the age of 31, Enzo Ferrando is the leader of the longshoremen in the Port of Genoa. He is respected for his abilities—and is also known to be impulsive. When he sinks a ship full of guns belonging to a powerful politician, the fallout leaves his father—an old war hero who served under Garibaldi—dead. Enzo himself is forced to join the Italian army in Eritrea. There he becomes captain of a company in the Galliano Battalion. “I profess that putting eighty-two souls in the hands of a dockworker seems to me dangerous and irresponsible,” he is told by his commanding officer. “But this commission came down from the top, and I am a man that follows orders. Your father had powerful friends.” Enzo soon establishes himself as the rare officer who will work and fight harder than any enlisted man, though his impulsiveness has not much subsided. Against the backdrop of Italy’s misadventures in Africa, Enzo attempts to live up to the name and deeds of his father—and leaves a legacy that his own son, Lucca, will have to live with once he is grown. Shore captures not only the war and politics of the time period, but the romantic lens through which the characters view their world: “The 540 men of Galliano Battalion called the garrison many things but never called it home. When it was not oppression by dust, it could be oppression by fog. Even the fog was dry and hit the lungs more like smoke than vapor, and it rolled in like a sinister mist, sometimes pervading the garrison for days on end.” As the story unfolds, that romanticism—and the heroism, colonialism, and violence it contains—is slowly called into question as the story shifts from the life of Enzo to that of Lucca. The book has a satisfying, unpredictable shape, and the plot—contrived as it often is—is always entertaining. Fans of historical fiction will enjoy this adventure set in a less well-known part of 19th-century Europe.
A swashbuckling and often surprising novel of Risorgimento Italy.Pub Date: March 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-63203-2
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Cinder Block Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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