An engaging and unsettling addition to the Titanic-themed fiction category.
Two sisters survive the sinking of the Titanic but face further danger when they return to England in this historical melodrama/mystery that poses the possibility of a nefarious reason for the grand ship’s rapid descent.
Poppy and Daisy Melville paid for their passage on the Titanic by securing positions as first-class stewardesses. They are the eldest of the four daughters of the Earl of Riddlesdown, an objectionable man ruled by his passion to produce a male heir. The two sisters have fled his home and are headed for California, where the impulsive 18-year-old Daisy is determined to become a Hollywood movie star. Nobody in Riddlesdown knows they have set sail for America. Both young women are rescued by Cunard Line’s Carpathia. But the reckless Daisy committed one final impetuous act while onboard the Titanic that will put her life in jeopardy when the surviving crew is forced to return to England. Meanwhile, back in London, Harry Hazelton, a former regimental officer and spy—injured in India after being attacked by a wild boar—is hired by the sisters’ uncle, the Bishop of Fordingbridge, to investigate the disappearance of his nieces. Add in two additional survivors—Ernie Sullivan, an Australian working as a Titanic fireman, and Alvin Towson, an American gambler—each with secret objectives, and there is plenty of material in the interactions among these characters for an intriguing drama. Hodgetts seamlessly weaves together records of survivor testimony and conclusions drawn by the British inquiry into the disaster with both her fictional characters and historical figures. The novel’s most riveting pages are the vivid opening scenes on the water, where Poppy sits in Lifeboat 14 watching the ship go down bow first and listening to the screams of the passengers pleading for help in the frigid Atlantic (“The starlight, cold and merciless, shone down on the people struggling in the water, and their desperate flailing produced a maelstrom of white phosphorescence”). But the story of the aftermath and coverups by the White Star Line and the British government are equally stunning and disturbing. It is a compelling backdrop to an engrossing tale that is at heart a traditional drama about life and love.
An engaging and unsettling addition to the Titanic-themed fiction category.Pub Date: May 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73760-703-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Emerge Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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