This is first-rate historical fiction that any fan of the genre will enjoy.
Richard Sharpe is fierce and fearless in his 22nd adventure for king and country.
The British have just defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, but a whole lot of blood is yet to be shed. As Lt. Col. Richard Sharpe helps his riflemen bury British dead, he receives orders from the Duke of Wellington to capture a citadel in a French town called Ham ("as in eggs") and release its prisoners, specifically Alan Fox, who trades in artworks and is making a list of stolen paintings. “So I’m to do the impossible,” he remarks, and is told “you have the devil’s own luck” and “you excel at dirty business.” Sharpe is a great series character who doesn’t fit the officer mold. He is the gutter-born bastard son of a prostitute and a random whorehouse customer. He’d been a rank-and-file soldier with deep scars on his back from flogging until the duke noticed his intelligence and bravery and made him an officer. But wouldn’t you know, now under his command is the captain who’d once had him flogged. No hard feelings, though? Think again. Sharpe threatens to flay the skin off the captain’s back if he orders any more floggings of the men. They are to go to Paris so Sharpe can find and kill a group of assassins known as la Fraternité, which either exists or is medieval claptrap. Vicious fights ensue in Parisian tunnels and in the open air. Sharpe’s formidable antagonist is the French Col. Lanier, a killing machine known as le Monstre, whose pleasures are “women, wine, and death to his enemies.” Their forces must meet—Sharpe has a battalion—and so must the two ferocious leaders. For them and their men, “it would be such a stupid time to die. The war was won.” And yet there’s still time for spectacular combat scenes, with swords and volley guns and thumbs in the eyes.
This is first-rate historical fiction that any fan of the genre will enjoy.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-256-326-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
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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