A dazzling war tale; fast-paced, gut-wrenching, and laced with uncertainty.
As World War II threatens to tear his country apart, a young Dutchman sails for America in this debut novel.
Emile van Driel twists the dials on his old radio to hear the “volume and hysteria” of an “upstart leader of the fledgling Nationalist Socialist Party” letting loose a volley of threats. A simple farmer from rural Netherlands, he senses darkness on the horizon and begins to prepare accordingly. Despite some skepticism from his wife, Helme, he arranges for their son, Johan, to set sail for the safety of America. Johan is 20 years old when he boards the Swift as a crew member—“young and inexperienced” for his age. His first days at sea prove a baptism by fire. Hampered by seasickness and lampooned by his crewmates, he learns that he must fight to make his mark on the world. During shore leave in Vancouver, he sees a sailor get his throat cut. Later, after finding bar work in New York, Johan shows his mettle by defending a tavern girl who has been set upon by a lecherous sea captain. The young man grows strong bodied and savvy as his journey progresses. Leaving the city, he secures a job working on an Amish farm until complications require him to again move on. His wanderings lead him across the United States before finding his true love, Emma van der Poole, his future wife, with whom he sets sail for Australia. As the momentum of World War II intensifies, Johan finds himself joining the U.S. Marines, taking his first tour of duty in Japan before returning to Europe. The unexpected introduction of a German sniper, Gunther Klause, adds a wicked twist to the narrative. Podbury is a skilled and intuitive writer. At times, his descriptions are painfully visceral: “The marine beside him screamed hideously as a burst of automatic fire laced his chest and the water by his side, effectively cutting him in half, and he fell forward into the breakers, his severed arteries bloodying the water around his still twitching corpse.” Yet the author is equally adept when penning Johan’s poignant letters home: “My dearest wife, I fear for my soul, if a man’s soul is what he truly is.” This is a detailed and emotionally sensitive account of a solitary man’s coming-of-age and his fight to stay alive for his family that should appeal to fans of war fiction and romance alike.
A dazzling war tale; fast-paced, gut-wrenching, and laced with uncertainty.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4917-8453-2
Page Count: 454
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
PROFILES
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
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