A disarming narrative about people grappling with the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.
In Wolfe’s debut novel, a GI fresh from World War II attempts to acclimate to college life.
In September 1945, U.S. Army Sgt. Dante Larocca has made it through the war with a Silver Star, extensive shrapnel scars, and a lot of experiences he’d rather forget. “Jagged memories thrummed through his brain: dead guys; blood; butchery; a dismantling fear; images of his former ringmaster, General Patton, swearing at some hapless lieutenant.” He spends his first day of civilian life driving around New York City, slashing the tires of an old rival and sneaking his Weimaraner dog into a movie theater. The revelation that his wife has been cheating on him in his absence, and is now pregnant with her lover’s child, leaves him feeling adrift. Using the GI Bill, he decides to study architecture at the University of Alabama. However, the American South is more alien to the Brooklyn native than the capitals of Europe, and he has no idea what to expect there. It turns out he needn’t have worried, as Tuscaloosa and the surrounding countryside are full of other vets looking to start a new chapter—many of them newly minted students like himself—as well as families still grieving the losses of their sons in combat. Most intriguing is Evelyn Curtis, a daredevil crop-duster pilot who flew with the Women’s Air Force Service Pilots during the war. Dante has two clear goals while in Tuscaloosa: to work with a legendary architect on the University of Alabama faculty and to win a prize that will allow him to study in Rome. Dante soon finds out the war isn’t going away anytime soon—not for him or for the other ex-soldiers—and it still has casualties to claim.
Over the course of this novel, Wolfe shows himself to be a skilled storyteller who clearly knows how to craft a scene and how to imbue even minor characters with personality and dimension. Most affecting are passages in which Dante grapples with his memories of the war, as when he stops to visit the family of a dead friend and gives them a sanitized version of his final moments: “It could have been true,” Dante thinks afterward. “It should have been. Anyway, someone who’s never been there can never understand, so why bother?...Buddy Fooshee had died in some parallel universe, a barbaric world alien to this lovely old farmhouse.” The novel doesn’t quite embrace a sense of realism; Dante and Evelyn are too cool and too charismatic, and they come off more like characters in a movie than real people. This makes for intriguing tension when more authentic-feeling moments of PTSD intrude into the narrative, highlighting the tension between society’s view of the Greatest Generation and how they actually lived their lives. Although this is by no means a flawless work—it’s melodramatic at times, far too long, and the entire text is inexplicably rendered in italics—it is a memorable one.
A disarming narrative about people grappling with the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-60489-314-4
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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
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