A painstakingly researched war story with complex characterizations.
Schrader, the author of The Emperor Strikes Back (2019), re-creates a pivotal period in World War II in this updated version of her 2007 novel.
In 1940, 24-year-old Royal Air Force fighter pilot Robin Priestman is injured on a difficult mission over France and forced to take leave at home in England. At a local canteen, he meets Emily Pryce, a smart Cambridge University grad, and the two fall quietly in love, foiling Robin’s mother’s plans to marry him to an heiress. When his broken ankle heals, he becomes a flight instructor for the RAF, tasked with turning very young men into flying aces. It’s not easy, and Robin’s anxiety about leading these boys into war is palpable in his solitary moments. In Germany, Klaudia von Richthofen has just joined the German Air Force Female Auxiliaries, surrounded by Nazi pilots, whom she sees as romantic heroes. Parallel stories from the German and British camps emerge: British pilot George “Ginger” Bowles is homesick and self-conscious about his lower-class status; Lt. Ernst Geuke, an inexperienced German wingman, worries he’ll never measure up to the Aryan ideal; he pines for Klaudia, who initially doesn’t give him the time of day. In the background are fears of capture or death by bomb or plane. Scenes exploring the characters’ inner lives are compelling, especially on the German side; for example, to Klaudia, Nazism is just about following rules, fitting in, and living up to her famous surname (she’s related to the infamous “Red Baron”), but back in her home village of Silesia, “Everyone still said good morning rather than ‘Heil Hitler’.” Schrader also succeeds in accurately portraying the bombing raids and defense missions that made up the Battle of Britain military campaign. Despite uneven pacing and occasional typographical errors, the story holds up, building to a satisfying, cinematic finale in which a few characters’ fates collide. Readers may find some of the plentiful military jargon difficult to parse despite the glossary included. However, Schrader’s attention to detail is sure to win over veterans, pilots, and military history buffs.
A painstakingly researched war story with complex characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73531-394-8
Page Count: 594
Publisher: Cross Seas Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2020
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
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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