An often enjoyable time-travel thriller with a rich historical setting.
Winburn takes readers into America’s revolutionary past in his debut military thriller.
In the 1980s, when a freak storm over Norfolk, Virginia, sets off a highly radioactive shipment of tritium, Master Gunnery Sergeant John Williams of the U.S. Marine Corps is sent back in time to the early days of the American Revolution. He finds himself in the Virginia colony of the 1770s, watching British Marines impressing American farmers into the King’s service. Still in possession of a stock of supplies and arms from his own time, Williams must quickly decide how he can participate in the past’s struggles without doing irreparable damage to the future. What are his duties as a soldier, as an American and as a visitor lost in time? Perhaps most importantly, what must he do to survive long enough to get back to his own present? Williams’ adventures take him through the first, fitful throes of the American Revolution, from (truly) colonial Williamsburg all the way to Tun Tavern in Philadelphia, where he participates in the birth of his own beloved Marine Corps. As its preface describes, the novel itself underwent its own strange travels through time: Winburn began writing it years ago, but died in 2002 before its completion; author Ralph Stoney Bates Sr. finished and edited it. Both men, coincidentally, served in the Marines. The resulting prose is crisp and procedural, reconnoitering every scene for the benefit of both Williams and readers. Though the first act lags a bit, as it sets up an unnecessarily complex inciting incident, the story picks up nicely after Williams gets to the colonial era. A requisite fish-out-of-water scenario unfolds, including a romantic entanglement and cameos from some Founding Fathers; overall, there’s little reinvention of the genre. However, despite this, the story succeeds: The mundane details of the period and setting make the work immersive. Like Michael Crichton before them, Winburn and Bates know that thrills are a dime a dozen in historical thrillers, but obsessive attention to period practices and details keep the pages turning.
An often enjoyable time-travel thriller with a rich historical setting.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500520823
Page Count: 524
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2015
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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