A rousing yarn that deftly delivers both a wartime adventure and a character study.
This first installment of a series offers a bloody war story ensconced in a tale of friendship.
The protagonist of Stewart’s novel is the revenge-driven Lance Fitch. Lance’s bucolic youth in East Africa ends in 1914 when a sadistic German officer has two of his Native friends killed and his younger brother Francis gets badly injured. Skilled hunter Lance later assassinates the officer. Soon after, Lance and another brother, Will, join the British infantry to fight in France. But Will is killed in a German artillery attack that is aided by reconnaissance planes. This brings the shellshocked Lance to a turning point. He decides that family and friendships are a weakness. He joins the Royal Flying Corps in order to better “kill Huns,” with retribution becoming his primary mission. Lance also forms an unlikely partnership with a pilot, Maj. Lord Arthur Wolsey, becoming a machine-gunner for the officer. Eventually, Arthur convinces Lance to join 100 Wing, an elite squad that targets the Flying Circus of “The Red Baron.” Against his wishes, Lance finds himself forming bonds with this new family despite its regular losses. Throughout, master tactician Lance’s obsession with vengeance keeps butting up against the moral requirements that he serve as a good teammate and leader. He struggles to discover a balance between the two. In the Historical Notes afterword, Stewart, a native of East Africa, explains that this book is the first volume in a series telling “ripping yarns” based on Arthurian legends and the air war of 1916 to 1918. He succeeds admirably, blending historical characters and events into an entertaining fictional story. The author manages this despite building his narrative around Lance, a character who’s often unlikable in his single-mindedness, although he later displays some laudable traits. Sanding the protagonist’s rough edges is Arthur, who tolerates Lance’s insolence since the aristocrat places more value on his talents. Most of the other characters prove disposable, but this is war, after all. Stewart brings to colorful life a time when battles took on a new look thanks to daring pilots inside flimsy aircrafts.
A rousing yarn that deftly delivers both a wartime adventure and a character study.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63988-131-4
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2022
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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