An ambitious but ultimately underwhelming story of immigration and labor.
In Fraser’s debut historical novel, a Scottish couple weathers the challenges of immigration to America.
In 1895 Scotland, William Fraser leaves his native Highlands for Dundee looking for work—even though conventional wisdom says that “you go to Dundee to find a woman, not a job.” This proves to be correct on both counts: William arrives to find the town shut down due to a strike by the women who work at the jute-fiber factories; he finally finds work loading wagons, and through a co-worker, he meets Mary Coyle, one of the jute spinners. The two quickly fall in love, although the pairing is not without controversy; Mary’s Irish Catholic father doesn’t condone her marriage to the Protestant William. William’s pending departure for the United States presents an even greater obstacle: His industrious father, Jack, has gone to work in the mines over there, and he wants William to join him. As William attempts to locate his dad in boomtowns across the American West, Mary lingers with her family in Dundee. Can their nascent love survive the time apart? It will depend on whether William can survive the mines’ deplorable conditions. Fraser’s prose quickly and effectively summons the dust and soot of the era without feeling stilted or antiquated, as in this passage, in which William makes his way through the streets of turn-of-the-century Seattle: “Walking felt good, though William had to dodge Commercial Street’s occupants: people were hawking wares, and men, both well dressed and ragged looking, and women with parasols were looking at storefront windows.” The author also succeeds in recreating the hardscrabble working conditions, both in Scotland and in the United States. However, there’s a feeling of inevitability to the plot that robs it of some of its liveliness. There’s plenty of movement, and it hums along nicely, but readers may find that the characters are generally too likable, and that their relationships feel too clean. Even so, fans of historical fiction will find much here to enjoy.
An ambitious but ultimately underwhelming story of immigration and labor.Pub Date: May 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-03-913384-6
Page Count: 366
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
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