A predictable plot with a sentimental streak a mile wide.
Soldier finds dog. Soldier loses dog. Soldier finds dog.
After his wife and daughter die in a plane crash, writer Fletcher Carson finds little to live for. After trying, but failing, to take his own life, he becomes inspired to enlist as a soldier and in the waning days of the war goes to Vietnam. There he’s with a platoon called the Fat Lady (because the opera/war won’t be over till she sings). On a dangerous reconnaissance mission deep in the jungle, the platoon unexpectedly (and somewhat unaccountably) comes across a badly wounded Labrador Retriever. Lt. Rogan, the platoon leader, orders Carson to shoot it, for he knows that sometimes dogs are cunningly wired to detonate and kill American troops, but Carson feels an immediate connection to the dog and refuses to obey Rogan’s direct order, endangering the men and enraging the lieutenant. Carson rescues the dog and takes it back to the base, enlisting the help of a veterinary-school dropout to bring the dog back to some semblance of health. Although Carson suspects the dog, whom he names Jack, has been trained by Americans to sniff out trip wires and booby traps, he’s unable to find the canine unit to which it had been attached, so he keeps it to protect his own platoon. Naturally, Jack responds by saving Rogan’s life. When a truce is declared and the troops are scheduled to return to the United States, Carson finds to his horror that Army dogs are regarded as “surplus military equipment” too expensive to ship home. He finds the order to abandon the dog unacceptable, so he remains behind with Jack, promising to get him out by tromping 350 miles through Vietnam, Laos and eventually into Thailand. Along the way, Carson gets captured, Jack disappears, Carson escapes, Jack reappears and Carson (with Rogan’s help) eventually makes it back.
A predictable plot with a sentimental streak a mile wide.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-62172-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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
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
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