An overflowing tale of love and war, with plot turns as swift as they are melodramatic.
In this novel of war and remembrance, a soldier-turned-attorney adds a new bullet point to his resume—stolen art investigator.
Elmer Davis is a renowned criminal defense lawyer in Washington, D.C., but none of his high-profile colleagues know about his experiences in World War II. Now 63 and disenchanted with the legal profession, he’s ready to tell all to his feisty girlfriend, Cecelia. So begins a flashback that occupies the first pages of the book. The year is 1943, and according to Davis, he’s “small, insignificant looking, a real klutz athletically, and a great disappointment to my parents.” He also has low self-esteem, but he decides to enlist in the Marines for the usual heroic reasons. “We are starting to win this war and it would be kind of exciting to kick the Germans out of Paris,” he tells Suzanne Robards, his first love, with whom he endures somewhat predictable heartbreak. Military service earns Davis a sense of identity and the nickname “Frog” for his impressive basso when calling out dirty ditties during field exercises. Wounded by shrapnel and captured by German forces—a scenario reminiscent of Hogan’s Heroes—Davis later finds some solace in the arms of an energetic Frau. “Elmer was like a kid who had just discovered ice cream,” the author says of his first sexual experience on a hospital cot, “he just couldn’t get enough.” After surviving the Russian invasion and celebrating the nuking of Hiroshima, Davis returns home, excels in college and puts his commanding voice to work in the courtroom. Back in the present, he has another surprise for Cecelia: He’s starting a new business recovering artwork stolen by the Nazis. “If I can get that first client,” he says, “I think the business will take off.” Then, somewhat unbelievably, he befriends his former Nazi captor and reignites sparks with his old flame. Author Loos paints on a broad canvas with impressive scope. Part coming-of-age novel, part legal thriller and part World War II story, the book is sprawling and ambitious if a bit overstuffed. Despite the clear prose, the dialogue can be comically formal: “ ‘I shall miss you,’ he said sadly. ‘You have been such a bright spot in my life.’ ” Still, those ready to go along for the ride are in for an exciting tale with plenty of ups and downs.
An overflowing tale of love and war, with plot turns as swift as they are melodramatic.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484041567
Page Count: 316
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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