Fury (Black Site, 2012, etc.) again enlists gung-ho Delta Force Maj. Kolt “Racer” Raynor for anti-terrorist action, and this time the threat involves missiles and airliners rather than forted-up bad guys on the ground.
With the once-cashiered Racer cautioned about the maverick decisions that got him canned, the major and team are HALO-dropped into India, where an airliner has been hijacked. Forced to land on the 767 as it moves onto the runway, the four harpoon their way into the cabin and dispose of the bad guys. Team member Stitch has a finger shot off in the melee. That leaves Racer, Digger and Slapshot to detour to chaotic Libya and extract a U.N. investigator who has uncovered post-revolution looting of Igla-S shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles. Curtis, CIA on station, doesn’t like Racer's rough-and-tumble solution. No problem, since the U.N. geek is safe. Racer’s team is then sent to Cairo because a former agent from Libya’s nefarious Jamahiriya Security Organization, Aref Saleh, has gone rogue and is distributing the airplane-killers to bad guys. In Cairo, Racer’s team liaisons with a resentful Curtis, and things go south because of lackadaisical CIA Operations Security. Enter David Wade Doyle, aka Daoud al-Amriki, California boy turned jihadist. Racer and al-Amriki met in Pakistan during the mission that earned Racer’s return to Delta. Now, al-Amriki is in Yemen training English-speaking jihadists to infiltrate the U.S. and bring down airliners with the Igla-S missiles. There’s more scoop about Delta Team operations in this Fury effort and a separate narrative about female members joining the Joint Special Operations Command, with Cindy Bird, code name Hawk, sent on the Egyptian reconnoiter. The bad guys get missiles into Mexico but are stymied at Nuevo Laredo in a messy Racer-led firefight. All but al-Amriki are KIA. Posse Comitatus keeps Delta from in-country operation, but Racer and recuperating fellow officer TJ, another Delta who hates al-Amriki, take leave to D.C. and tie up a perfect-coincidence termination.
Action-adventure from an author who’s been at the sharp end of the spear.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-66838-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
11
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Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A love letter to the power of books and friendship.
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Women become horseback librarians in 1930s Kentucky and face challenges from the landscape, the weather, and the men around them.
Alice thought marrying attractive American Bennett Van Cleve would be her ticket out of her stifling life in England. But when she and Bennett settle in Baileyville, Kentucky, she realizes that her life consists of nothing more than staying in their giant house all day and getting yelled at by his unpleasant father, who owns a coal mine. She’s just about to resign herself to a life of boredom when an opportunity presents itself in the form of a traveling horseback library—an initiative from Eleanor Roosevelt meant to counteract the devastating effects of the Depression by focusing on literacy and learning. Much to the dismay of her husband and father-in-law, Alice signs up and soon learns the ropes from the library’s leader, Margery. Margery doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her, rejects marriage, and would rather be on horseback than in a kitchen. And even though all this makes Margery a town pariah, Alice quickly grows to like her. Along with several other women (including one black woman, Sophia, whose employment causes controversy in a town that doesn’t believe black and white people should be allowed to use the same library), Margery and Alice supply magazines, Bible stories, and copies of books like Little Women to the largely poor residents who live in remote areas. Alice spends long days in terrible weather on horseback, but she finally feels happy in her new life in Kentucky, even as her marriage to Bennett is failing. But her powerful father-in-law doesn’t care for Alice’s job or Margery’s lifestyle, and he’ll stop at nothing to shut their library down. Basing her novel on the true story of the Pack Horse Library Project established by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, Moyes (Still Me, 2018, etc.) brings an often forgotten slice of history to life. She writes about Kentucky with lush descriptions of the landscape and tender respect for the townspeople, most of whom are poor, uneducated, and grateful for the chance to learn. Although Alice and Margery both have their own romances, the true power of the story is in the bonds between the women of the library. They may have different backgrounds, but their commitment to helping the people of Baileyville brings them together.
A love letter to the power of books and friendship.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-56248-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Categories: GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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