Cornwell's latest is often bloody, sometimes ribald, but always smartly done. Fans might be disappointed with this effort’s...
"Englaland" [sic], King Alfred once said, "will be God’s land," but first the Norse and the Danes, worshippers of the old gods, must be banished, a bloody struggle Cornwell (The Empty Throne, 2015, etc.) chronicles in the ninth of his Saxon series.
This tale’s a continuous barrage of battles, interspersed with political, social, and religious intrigue. In the 10th century, Saxon King Edward (Alfred's son) rules Wessex and East Anglia. Mercia is ruled by Edward’s sister, Lady Æthelflaed. Between those three regions and wild Scotland is Northumbria, controlled by Norsemen and Danes. Edward is cautious, unwilling yet to move north. The more adventurous Lady Æthelflaed’s being prodded by her ally Uhtred, Lord of Bebbanburg, whose northern lands are held by the invaders. Wielding his sword, Serpent-Breath, Uhtred speeds to battle when Ragnall the Cruel, leading Norsemen, Danes, and Irish, sails up the River Mærse. Ragnall intends to conquer and unite the four kingdoms. Thus begin battles large and small, culminating at Hrothwulf’s Farm. (Cornwell includes a map and place name index.) Uhtred, always attacking at "wolf-light," the mist-riven pre-dawn hours, has grown into a multidimensional character, and Cornwell’s vivid descriptions do justice to the sceptered isle. Beyond the sword and shield are interesting themes about political expediency, personal loyalty, and the complicated confrontations between early Christians and worshippers of pagan gods. Cornwell’s archaic curses are fun—"a useless lump of self-important gristle"—and there’s more than one colorful factoid—bleached skulls on ramparts become a fear-inspiring "ghost fence." As usual, Cornwell’s research gives the book veracity, and his rendering of the tale from Uthred’s point of view allows immersion into the complex story of how disparate kingdoms became England.
Cornwell's latest is often bloody, sometimes ribald, but always smartly done. Fans might be disappointed with this effort’s brevity, though, and new readers will be better served by beginning at the start of the series (The Last Kingdom, 2005).Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-225094-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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