Shamelessly sentimental, although many will fall for Hyde’s tidy, quick-going, mannerist paragraphs.
Hyde perfects the heart-string-pulling techniques of Pay It Forward (2000), this time in a story about a WWII soldier reincarnated in the body of a free-spirited 21-year-old California man who tracks down the soldier’s now elderly old buddy and best girl—to humorous, romantic effect.
“Usually when the hero dies the story is over,” Walter Crowley says in his gee-gosh manner in the first chapter. Walter is a dead WWII hero from Ocean City, New Jersey, who enlisted in 1942 with his best buddy from high school, Andrew Whittaker, and gained a posthumous Purple Heart for bravery. Except that 40 years later Walter is “stuck” in the spirit world, he tells us, harboring grudges and feeling undeserving of his Purple Heart because of the cowardice he exhibited during that moment of crisis. Walter haunts a pot-smoking, sax-playing kid—Michael Steeb—to get him to contact the original Andrew, now in his 60s and living in Albuquerque, in order to set straight the true story behind Walter’s death in Guadalcanal—and to find out how Andrew had the gumption to marry Walter’s fetching red-haired fiancée, Mary Ann. Michael Steeb learns that he carries all of Walter’s memories, and the ones from Walter’s courtship of Mary Ann four decades before induce Michael to fall in love with her all over again, causing enormous havoc within the aged and bitter Andrew and various onlookers who are horrified at the sight of a sixtysomething lady kissing a mere kid. However absurd the premise, Hyde hooks her reader through artless evocation of an earlier, innocent, patriotic era à la Our Town. “I’d like to tell you that I properly appreciated every single moment of the life I was given,” Walter says, echoing the wholesome goodness of almost everyone here.
Shamelessly sentimental, although many will fall for Hyde’s tidy, quick-going, mannerist paragraphs.Pub Date: April 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-684-86723-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
The World War II setting and supernatural cast are promising, but a great deal of the narrative feels like place-setting for...
A young Hungarian woman prepares to fend off Hitler (and his army of Nazi werewolves) in this busy supernatural thriller.
When we meet Magda, the narrator of this first novel in a planned trilogy, it’s the summer of 1939 and she’s living a quiet life in Budapest, working for a vampire in a café. Magda knows her lineage as a witch of the Lazarus clan, but she's only modestly skilled with her powers. She gets an opportunity to improve quickly, though. Her sister, Gisele, is having horrific prophetic visions of the war and Holocaust that will soon consume Europe, and because their Jewish heritage puts their lives in danger they plot not only to make their escape from Hungary but also to do battle against the evil spirits Hitler is marshaling. Doing so requires getting hold of an ancient book, The Book of the Angel Raziel, and keeping it out of the Nazi’s hands, though the power contained in the book isn’t entirely clear. This novel is largely a travelogue of Magda’s journey across Europe to find the book, and through the astral plane as well: Devoured by a pack of SS werewolves, she’s sent to heaven, but capable of returning if she so chooses. That flexibility plays into the theme of free will with which Lang infuses the story, as Magda confronts spirits, family members and soldiers on both sides of the imminent war. That gives the novel some philosophical heft but relatively little action, and the codes of conduct in Lang’s spiritual world sometimes seem arbitrary. Firm prohibitions against calling on certain spirits, for instance, prove to be toothless, and it’s not clear what harm, if any, death brings. The book is enlivened by a couple of entertaining cameos by war photographer Robert Capa and from Hitler himself, accompanied by his “paramour, the werebitch Eva Braun,” but the story culminates in a battle that resolves little.
The World War II setting and supernatural cast are promising, but a great deal of the narrative feels like place-setting for the next installment.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2317-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A clever, engaging diversion with just enough substance to chew on.
Following a novel of magic and ancient Egypt (The Alchemist, 2001) and a romantic werewolf series (The Passion, 1998; etc.), Boyd offers an intriguing, though never actually scary, ghost story (with echoes of the movie The Others).
Mary wakes without memory in a undefined place, then returns to her home, where she catches momentary glimpses of Paul and Elsie Mason, whom she believes to be her family. Her circumstances and formal diction tell us she’s a ghost long before she figures it out. Paul, a once successful author with writer’s block, and Elsie, his unhappy, isolated,13-year-old daughter, are spending the summer at the lake-house outside Chapel Hill; his wife, Penny, a busy surgeon, joins them when she can, which isn’t often. Paul’s brief, thoughtless, affair with a student cost him his teaching job, and Penny’s near-total absorption in her work has their marriage hanging by a thread and has put their daughter in therapy. Elsie and Paul, separately, encounter Mary; Penny, when she visits, has disturbing, blood-soaked dreams of murder. Because they’re so alienated from one another, their experiences remain secrets, driving the family further apart, until Paul and Elsie finally speak up and form a new bond, discussing and researching their ghost. Cathy, Paul’s sister and Penny’s best friend, coping with her husband’s terminal cancer, has thrown herself into researching her family history; Cathy’s loss, meanwhile, makes Penny rediscover her love for Paul, and her research reveals that a Mason ancestor murdered Mary’s family. In a satisfyingly plotted climax, the Masons and Mary come together to restore the ghost’s memory, allowing her to move on in the afterlife, thus saving both the marriage and Elsie’s life—for Elsie, we find out, has suppressed the memory of her best friend’s suicide and is headed that way, too—good deeds that were the purpose of the visitation.
A clever, engaging diversion with just enough substance to chew on.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-46235-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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