Some interesting characters and compelling set pieces, but from this talented storyteller (Scorched Earth, 2002, etc.), it’s...
The last WWII battle between the Russians and the Germans produced a crescendo of death and destruction—and, now, a surprisingly flat novel.
In 1943, Hitler, still reeling from his Stalingrad debacle, rolls the dice in Russia a final time, hoping to recoup by taking the key city of Kursk. It’s heavily defended, but Hitler has a dazzling new weapon: tanks, or rather a particular tank, the mighty Mark VI, a.k.a. the Tiger. This war machine dominates wherever it appears, inspiring the kind of blind adoration that undercuts tactics and makes fools out of generals. The Russians have their T-34, clever, darting lightweights, but the Tigers are super-tanks: “proud and powerful like fresh angry bulls.” Hopelessly in love, Hitler counts on them to deliver victory in Operation Citadel, the monster battle that will soon involve two million men—and a few women. Among them is Lieutenant Katya Berka, one of the so-called Night Witches: female bomber pilots who fly tiny, fragile planes, fly them “low and slow” in the interest of maximum accuracy, and fly them in almost constant peril. But Katya never thinks much about peril. Cossacks don’t, and that's what Katya is: a horseless Cossack with attitude intact. It’s a description that applies with equal force to her father Dima and big brother Volya , T-34 men who drive their tank as if it had four legs and a flowing mane. In the coming fight, gallant Katya will do her share and more; still, everybody knows it will be a tank battle, epic and Tiger-centered, but nobody has a true fix on how that will translate in terms of carnage.
Some interesting characters and compelling set pieces, but from this talented storyteller (Scorched Earth, 2002, etc.), it’s a slow-moving disappointment, impeded by all that tank lore.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-553-80177-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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
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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