A seductively dark, wholly imaginative piece of historical fiction.
A thoroughly engaging tale of love, mystery, murder and revolt set against the backdrop of antebellum Virginia.
Counihan’s new novel begins like Dickens. A young Londoner stuck between classes in the stratified society of 19th-century England is orphaned when his mother dies of cholera. But this fatherless boy, Victor Neville, is no Oliver Twist. He has a patron in his American uncle Robert, and he’s whisked away to his rich relative’s Virginia homestead, Providence Plantation. What was Dickens now feels more like Margaret Mitchell. In the hands of a lesser author, such a transoceanic shift would seem abrupt, amateurish or unbelievable, but Counihan is no such author, and we follow him—and Victor—willingly across the Atlantic Ocean to find what new adventures await the young boy. The work then sets up like a bildungsroman that will tell the story of Victor’s maturation. But 40 pages in, the novel morphs from a simple coming-of-age tale into a mysterious, inventive take on the subgenre of plantation fiction. After his arrival in Virginia, Victor saves one of his uncle’s slaves from the sexual predations of the overseer, Murphy. In the aftermath, a violent turn of events leaves Robert and Murphy dead and Victor recovering from shock in the care of the young woman he saved, Cleo. As he and Cleo become romantically entangled, Victor witnesses a sort of soft coup that leaves the slaves in a precarious state of freedom as the Civil War looms. Throughout, Counihan writes with grace and confidence. His prose is governed by a tight economy of language that leaves few wasted words. However, his tight writing is not sparse, and it leaves room for him to indulge in both lush descriptions of land and architecture and flights of philosophical fancy. Further, his recreation of 19th-century Virginia feels historically accurate. The author’s extensive knowledge of the Civil War—Counihan has a Ph.D. in American history—serves as the tale’s foundation, never as mere ornament.
A seductively dark, wholly imaginative piece of historical fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-1451579512
Page Count: 316
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2012
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
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
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