A pleasant blend of light humor, drama and cracking historical naval action—another solid entry in the series.
Lambdin’s rough-but-lovable rascal Captain Alan Lewrie (King, Ship, and Sword, 2010, etc.) returns for a 17th installment.
Following the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens, war is back on between England and Bonaparte’s France, and Lewrie finds himself off the coast of Haiti in his frigate Reliant. Lewrie, along with fellow seamen on other ships in his squadron, sits outside Port-au-Prince harbor awaiting the surrender of a group of French ships, as the island's former colonizers have just been expelled following L’Ouverture’s successful rebellion. After a close call trying to save a ship full of civilians run aground within sight of the vengeful guns of the long-oppressed Haitians, Lewrie and the other captains head north, to escort a fleet of merchant ships back to England—“herding cats,” as Lewrie’s puts it. Before they set off, though, Lewrie learns that he is to be knighted soon after his return to England, although he fears it may be more out of sympathy for the loss of his wife—murdered by French assassins—than a reward for meritorious service. During the ceremony, King George III, famous for his poor mental health, extends himself a little farther than intended, to Captain Sir Alan’s benefit. During the fêting that surrounds the ceremony, Lewrie meets the lovely Lydia Stangbourne and her rakish brother Percy. Lewrie hasn’t been involved with a woman since his wife’s death. Neither he nor Lydia are unknown to scandal, and they soon develop deeper feelings. But, as always, new orders come in, and soon Lewrie is helping to test an experimental weapon that threatens to rub wrong even Lewrie’s notoriously flexible sense of military honor. Although the book doesn’t really stand on its own—it’s not meant too, of course—newcomers to the series will delight in Lambdin’s expert deployment of period detail; his mastery of the details of life on a 19th-century frigate; and the irresistible Captain Alan Lewrie himself.
A pleasant blend of light humor, drama and cracking historical naval action—another solid entry in the series.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-55185-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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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