First of a series certain to seduce armchair sailors.
Nazi U-boats threaten the sweetly daffy residents of an island in the Outer Banks.
Setting his irresistibly romantic WWII adventure on the fictional Carolina barrier island of Killakeet, long before the coming of the hulking cottages or the invention of time sharing, memoirist Hickam (Sky of Stone, 2001, etc.) successfully knits the true story of Germany’s turkey shoot off the East Coast with the low-key lives of the fishermen, wild horses, lighthouse keepers, and other village types who had the beautiful place largely to themselves. Sturdy, smart Josh Thurlow, son of the present keeper of the Killakeet lighthouse has come back to the island after years away to take charge of the tiny Coast Guard station. Haunted by his responsibility for the disappearance at sea of his two-year-old brother Jacob, Josh has declined the inheritance of the family business, but he has thrown himself deeply into his new job, whipping the local lads who crew his rescue boat into a force capable of dealing with the certain menace of German submarines. Oddly, he seems to be the only officer in the Coast Guard able to see the vulnerability of the countless merchantmen who steam past the Graveyard of the Atlantic. And the Germans are indeed watching, particularly Kapitan Leutnant von Krebs, ace skipper of U-560. Krebs, who gained and lost the love of his life and acquired responsibility for a smart young orphan in one eventful visit to his childhood orphanage home, begins picking off the ships as quickly as he can launch his torpedoes. Josh gets no help from the higher-ups, but he can count on small-bore gunfire support from his recovering sophisticate girlfriend Josie who teams up with a Hollywood stunt rider as a mounted patrol. (It actually makes sense.) The situation worsens with the arrival of Supernazi sub skipper Vogel who has it in for Krebs. And that orphan on U-560, is it just coincidence that he’s the exact age of the missing toddler Jacob? Or that he washes ashore after a crash dive?
First of a series certain to seduce armchair sailors.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30189-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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