A creative addition to the annals of fictional naval warfare.
This inventive debut wartime novel transports military buffs right into the heart of the action.
Weatherly, a pen name for a retired U.S. Navy captain who commanded three ships over 30 years of service, has chosen an intriguingly flawed protagonist for this World War II–set story. In 1942, Capt. Sheppard McCloud is lauded as a national hero. He commanded the USS Shenandoah in a failed counterattack against the Japanese after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. He’s now recovering from a serious leg injury from that assault and keeps blaming himself for the deaths of his crew members that day. The Navy finds him fit for duty again, but his unspoken doubts remain: “Now that his physical injuries were healing, the Navy assumed that Sheppard was still that confident leader…but they were wrong.” McCloud soon finds himself in command of the battle cruiser Argonne, part of a battle group tasked with an important mission to secure shipping lanes from German U-boats, ships and planes so that badly needed supply convoys can reach the beleaguered British. The question is whether he’s up for the challenge and whether he can outrun his ghosts: “He had to become the confident leader again for the sake of his new command. He knew that if he failed, the men would doubt him and more sailors—his sailors—again…would die.” Weatherly does a masterful job of describing the American, British and German soldiers who will eventually take part in the battle, and most importantly, he makes readers become invested in these characters. He also accomplishes the tricky task of supplying enough detail for hard-core military aficionados without derailing casual readers. Overall, he successfully brings the world of naval warfare to life in all its sound and fury. However, he never glorifies it, as he also paints the sobering aftermath in somber tones.
A creative addition to the annals of fictional naval warfare.Pub Date: May 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491731925
Page Count: 352
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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