A carefully researched and accessible novel about a pivotal operation in postwar Germany.
Schrader continues her dramatization of the Berlin Airlift in this sequel.
During the 15-month operation from the spring of 1948 to the summer of ’49, Allied aircraft dropped millions of tons of food and fuel into West Germany after the Soviet Union blocked shipping by rail and by sea. British Journalist Virginia Cox-Gordon, one of the many characters in this follow-up to Cold Peace (2023), thinks of the operation as “the Western Allies’ hopeless plan to supply the entire civilian population of Berlin by air” and as the most important news story since Germany’s surrender. Virginia and other characters return from Cold Peace, and new players are introduced as the Berlin operation complicates the lives of members of the Royal Air Force, the U.S. Air Force, Emergency Air Services, the Berlin city government, and Berlin’s civilian population, who are living under a new dictatorship as Josef Stalin’s grip tightens. The novel covers a few months of the operation, and by making use of the large cast, Schrader is able to take readers into virtually every aspect of the drama, including the experiences of ordinary Germans and their representatives, such as city councilor Jakob Liebherr (“a glance at his surroundings reminded him of just how important hope was”), and those of the flyers, who risk their lives in the continuous air missions and also note how the world is changing. Even Soviet personnel feel the same: “All the good men,” one reflects, “the men who fought the war, are being replaced by party hacks, by NKVD stooges.”
The size of Schrader’s cast may be especially daunting for readers coming to this book without having read the first in the series. However, she effectively overcomes this element of intimidation in several well-deployed ways. She peppers her cast with intriguing characters, including Women’s Auxiliary Air Force Cpl. Galyna Borisenko, a Soviet-born Ukrainian who’s now a British citizen but still very much in alien territory, and wing commander and Battle of Britain veteran Robert Priestman, who bravely continues the airlift even in the face of a Soviet takeover of the entire city: “If I can help save 17,000 civilians—the bulk of them children—from Stalin, then I will,” he declares at one point. “It’s the moral equivalent of going down fighting.” Priestman also notes the emergence of a new world in which the British Empire “could no longer shower largesse upon the poor of the world as America could.” The most colorful aspect of the Berlin Airlift—when planes delivered candies to the children of the city—is in many ways the dramatic centerpiece of this novel. The whimsical happiness of these “candy drops” helps to counterbalance the novel’s unfortunate penchant for delivering large blocks of exposition. Also, as in many wartime stories, several members of the cast feel more like familiar types than fully developed characters. Still, the power of the book is in how a true sense of humanity prevails.
A carefully researched and accessible novel about a pivotal operation in postwar Germany.Pub Date: May 15, 2024
ISBN: 9798987177020
Page Count: 516
Publisher: Cross Seas Press
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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