A well-researched, engaging war tale infused with Christmas themes and a gentle romance.
A historical novel throws a young man into the World War I trenches with a glimpse of possible salvation through love.
November 1916. Deep in France in the Valley of the Somme, Harry Wheatly is “sick of dirt, sick of death, and sick of the everlasting mud.” He keeps colorful visions of Saskatchewan, Canada, alive by reading the Bible his grandmother gave him. Tragically, the book falls in the mud, so he takes it on an operation to Amiens, hoping to clean it. But he loses the Bible in a river, where local widow Rosemarie Legrand retrieves it. Seeing that the book is soaked, Harry loses hope until Rosemarie offers to dry it in the sun daily until his return. She treats the task like a mission: It is “vital to her to rescue his book as if it too had become a victim of war.” When possible, he brings Rosemarie and her son, Marcel, rations, but always deems the Bible in need of more drying as an excuse to return. Rosemarie eagerly anticipates Harry’s visits as he earns her love, and he tries to see her every Christmas morning as the war continues. But in 1918, when the Germans press into France, she must flee to the countryside and they lose track of each other. After the Armistice, Harry is sent to Wales. He contracts the Spanish flu, putting his love and life at risk. In the postwar chaos, many obstacles must be overcome if the lovers are to reunite. Warfield (Valentines From Bath, 2019, etc.) has authored numerous historical novels and this fourth entry in the Holiday Collection series continues to demonstrate her mastery of period details. The passages about civilian living conditions, military movements, and the soldiers’ challenges lend a laudable degree of authenticity to the story (When Harry “first reached France, he had found solace in writing poetry, but he had long run out of metaphors for death...Harry was sure he had begun to go mad the morning it occurred to him that even the fighting would be preferable to the long slow annihilation of those trapped in the hell of the trenches”). The romance is quiet with a touch of passion. A minor flaw is the lack of maps for readers who are less informed about World War I.
A well-researched, engaging war tale infused with Christmas themes and a gentle romance.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73324-501-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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