Lots of mud and lots of blood. Historical fun for the lads.
Aristocratic sergeant Jack Crossman is in at the end of the siege of Sebastopol as the Crimean War comes to its close, leaving him free to soldier on in India when the series continues.
Kilworth’s brainy aristocratic hero returns in the fifth “Fancy Jack” Crossman adventure (US debut: The Winter Soldiers, 2003), still not getting enough baths, still seriously flirting with slightly damaged heiress Jane Mulinder, still ordering about the gang of toughs assigned to those special bits of subversion beyond the capability of your garden-variety redcoat. The siege seems to be going pretty much nowhere. The Sebastopolitans are starving and miserable, but the Russian occupiers appear to have limitless firepower to back a seemingly impregnable position, and the opposing British, French, Turkish and other allied forces have been losing thousands of troops to a series of suicidal attacks on the Redan, the Russian fortress. On top of the general misery, Jack, the bastard son of a career soldier baronet, has to duck the inevitable confrontation and settling with evil Captain Campbell, the gambler who bankrupted Jack’s beloved half-brother. Campbell is still smarting from a humiliation Jack dealt him, and when he at last recognizes Jack under the scruffy beard he’s sporting, Campbell rats the sergeant out for having impersonated an officer in a card game. Stripped of his stripes, Jack has to take orders like the rest of the troops on their final commando raid, a sortie that nearly wipes the band out when Peterson, their female sharpshooter, opens fire early on the Russians who had recently captured and raped her. A female sharpshooter? Just part of the odd scenery in an old-fashioned war attended by upmarket ladies and a hard-charging embedded reporter from the former American colonies. It all wraps up with one last suicidal assault in which Jack just might win back those stripes and patient Jane.
Lots of mud and lots of blood. Historical fun for the lads.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1260-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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