An often engaging tale of a young couple finding love in the face of death.
A work of historical fiction centered on a romantic relationship and the threat of nuclear war.
Mykola Kravchenkos and Oksana Aleksandrovna Kovalska could not be more different. Mykola, a Ukrainian refugee living in Pennsylvania, hears a story from his father of a time after the fall of the Soviet Union when he was crossing the ocean on a boat full of nuclear weaponry. A cyclone hit the vessel, scattering bombs into the sea; all were safely recovered, he says, except for one. Thus, Mykola’s obsession with finding the errant bomb begins. On the other side of the world, in Odesa, Ukraine, young Oksana practices her figure skating. Her graceful movements catch the eye of a secret agent in Moscow, who offers her a scholarship to a mysterious organization—and soon, she’s gathering intelligence for the Russian government. The two characters’ stories collide as Mykola’s search for the bomb leads him to Oksana, who’s on a similar, government-sponsored mission. The two fall for each other, and their illicit relationship is soon challenged by circumstances and authorities. Over the course of the novel, Adams’ narrative voice is stylish and quick-witted: “How could anyone lose a nuke? Difficult as it may sound, Ukraine, with a little help from Mother Nature, accomplished just that.” However, the plot feels a bit too familiar and predictable. From the moment Oksana and Mykola meet, the story beats are easy to foresee. This doesn’t mean that they’re not worth reading, as the journey is marked with fine prose, plenty of tension, a balanced mix of action and romance, and well-rounded characters. Mykola’s lifetime search for the weapon and Oksana’s true passion for figure skating are constants that are shown to affect the characters’ emotional attachments to their respective missions.
An often engaging tale of a young couple finding love in the face of death.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63988-502-2
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 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 sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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