Lambdin (The Invasion Year, 2011, etc.) spins another salt-spray-in-the-face sea yarn, a tale of Captain Lewrie in command of the good ship Reliant and in pursuit of privateers.
It’s 1805. Great Britain is at war with Napoleon, and Spain is the emperor’s ally. Privateers from both nations prey on merchant traffic. Reliant is anchored in Plymouth harbor while Lewrie enjoys a bit of featherbed entertainment with his lover, Lydia Stangbourne. Then Admiralty orders arrive. Reliant is to hoist sail for Bermuda, then the Bahamas and finally patrol the Florida coast for privateers. Storms and fair winds abound, canvas is unfurled from flying jib to topsail, with Lambdin master of all things seaworthy as Britannia rules the waves. Reliant navigates the reefs and shoals of Bermuda, and then Lewrie deals with the Honourable Francis Forrester, once a shipmate and now a vain Nassau-anchored harbor-warrior. Lambdin’s knowledge is encyclopedic, with much esoteric information about Cuba and Florida in the early 1800s, about towns and harbors along America’s southeast coast, about people and their lives, about political tensions over America’s neutrality as great powers warred in the New World. The dialogue is spot-on—“I despise him for a pus-gutted, slovenly, arrogant, idle waste of the Crown’s money as ever I clapped eyes on, sir”—and there’s sufficient powder smoke, cannons fired and grog downed to satisfy ambitious armchair sailors. Reliant brushes Cuba, patrols the Florida Keys and sinks two privateers in Mayami Bay before stumbling upon the French privateer Otarie at Charleston. Lewrie, lord of the Reliant and an ocean away from the Admiralty, worries about his sons, both serving in the Royal Navy, his daughter living with his brother, his half-Cherokee bastard son and his love affair with Lydia, the first woman to reach his heart since the death of his wife, all while cornering and conquering a gaggle of privateers in the marshy inlets along the Florida-Georgia coast. Aye, sir. Lewrie's a worthy shipmate for Aubry and Hornblower.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-59571-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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 writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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