A riveting caper set against the backdrop of Europe’s darkest hours.
In this spy novel, when a teenager travels to a bustling port city, he has no idea that he’s about to contribute to one of the most important events of the 20th century.
It is June 1944, and Tommy Collins, the young son of a British naval officer, is headed home to Winchester from school. World War II is in full swing, and England is reeling from air raids, bombs, and food rations. Rumors are spreading that the Allies are about to invade Europe, and hours after Tommy arrives, his father is summoned to Southampton to assist with the war effort. Thanks to a lack of child care, Tommy tags along, making himself useful by running messages and helping out. Despite being warned of the dangers of wandering through town, Tommy cannot help himself. The port is full of boats, more than anyone has seen at one time, and the air is full of anticipation. During a walk, Tommy meets Annike Meier, a Dutch Jewish teenager who came to England on the Kindertransport. Annike is assembling a radio to contact her parents, and once it works, she makes a terrifying discovery: There are German spies in Southampton, communicating top-secret intelligence about the invasion. What follows is a rapid-fire story of two plucky teens whose dedication to the war effort finds them risking their lives to discover and stop the spies. Moss creates a gripping and lean story full of action and excitement. The characters are well formed; readers will feel Annike’s sadness and understand Tommy’s moral code. Even though the beginning of the tale features a great deal of exposition regarding the ravages of the war on England and the sacrifices many people have made, rarely do those moments feel didactic. Rather, the author deftly sets the scene of England in the throes of a war that feels endless. Once Annike discovers the German messages, the story unfolds at a brisk pace, barely taking a minute to breathe and leaving readers itching to reach the end.
A riveting caper set against the backdrop of Europe’s darkest hours.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 117
Publisher: Encelia Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2021
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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