by Briar Hill ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 30, 2023
An entertaining but uneven tale about marriage, violence, and historical preservation.
A rising power couple consider the fate of an old church in this debut novel.
For almost three centuries, St. Thomas Cathedral has loomed above the town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, though it’s been years since anyone has prayed in it. The town hires the Boston-based engineering firm Hennessy Brothers to conduct a historical assessment of the property. The experts tasked with this appraisal are Carrie Medford and Jason Wiltshire, whose long-simmering romantic tension has only recently erupted into a brief courtship and a high-profile wedding (Carrie is the daughter of one of the richest men in New England). While on a honeymoon in Britain checking out cathedrals of a similar age as St. Thomas, the couple manage to uncover a massive pornography ring, making them heroes to the country’s public and earning Jason a knighthood. (They also meet an odd woman who foretells that Jason will be a “Master Builder” and “the one who will restore the holy and sanctify the holy ground.”) When they get back to Massachusetts, Jason is determined to find a way to save and renovate St. Thomas, though Carrie isn’t sure it’s possible. The project will hinge on many factors, including Jason and Carrie’s quick rise within their company; her wealthy father, a former Green Beret; and some gangland murders in China. The ambitious book flips between a few different modes: Sometimes it reads like a political thriller and sometimes a marriage story with intriguing elements of Dan Brown–style religious mystery. The novel has plenty of fun moments along the way. Unfortunately, Hill’s odd linguistic tics take some getting used to (“F-ck” appears on nearly every other page). Still, the novel’s original sin is its nearly 800-page length. Events (some of them unbelievable) keep happening, but they fail to build on one another in a meaningful way, and many readers won’t care about Carrie and Jason enough to follow them on their long journey.
An entertaining but uneven tale about marriage, violence, and historical preservation.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2023
ISBN: 9781998190980
Page Count: 776
Publisher: Tellwell Talent
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 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
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