More of the same: great naval action and deep historical detail in the vein of O’Brian and Forrester.
The further nautical adventures of Lambdin’s (Reefs and Shoals, 2012, etc.) Capt. Sir Alan Lewrie, baronet.
This book begins where Reefs and Shoals left off—with Lewrie commanding HMS Reliant and in charge of a handful of ships tasked with protecting the Bahamas. When a fresh squadron comes to take over defense of the islands, Lewrie wastes no time getting on the bad side of the pompous commodore, who promptly sends Lewrie back to England to have Reliant cleaned and refitted for duty. Once there, left without anything to do, Lewrie must scrounge up fresh orders in order to move Reliant up the long list of ships in need of attention. Using all of his considerable wiles, he manages to get Reliant attached to a fleet ferrying soldiers for an invasion meant to take Cape Town from the Dutch. Despite a series of misadventures, while waiting for Reliant’s hull to be scraped, he manages to spend some time with his new love, Lydia Stangbourne. Once Reliant is seaworthy again, he joins the fleet, and upon arriving in Cape Town, Lewrie talks his way into a naval brigade sent ashore with the troops and sees some action on land. But once the British secure the Cape, the admiral in charge sends the entire fleet to South America for a poorly planned invasion of the Argentine. Lewrie has no choice but to follow orders and does his best to make the best of a potentially bad situation. As its title suggests, several important plot points take place on dry land rather than onboard Lewrie’s frigate. Still, the principal draws remain the same: first, an immersive level of detail on everything from the minutia of life aboard ship to the nuances of period speech, and second, Lewrie himself, a compelling blend of duty-bound naval officer and incorrigible scamp. And when Reliant finally does find itself in a scrape at sea, the ensuing battle is absolutely thrilling.
More of the same: great naval action and deep historical detail in the vein of O’Brian and Forrester.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-59572-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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