A grand, if sometimes grandiose, portrayal of a szabla-wielding hero.
Tomaszek (Dance the Golden Calf, 2016, etc.) offers a sweeping novel of historical military fiction set in 17th-century Poland.
Young Boles?aw Radok, known to most as “Bolek,” lives in the southern part of the country on his family’s farm. Although the land around him is one of beautiful mountains and lakes, it’s also full of danger. It’s the late 1600s, during the reign of King Jan III Sobieski, and threats of Ottoman invasion and harassment from bandits are very real. Bolek hopes to one day wield a curved sword, known as a szabla, and spill the blood of enemies with tremendous strikes. All his dreams seem lost, however, when his family farm is attacked by brigands. When help arrives in the form of four knights, Bolek’s life is forever changed. They’re part of a cavalry group known as the pancerni and annihilating aggressors is no more difficult to them than drinking vodka. Led by the religious yet deadly Priest, the men eventually agree to take Bolek under their wing. Should he survive his training, he will be a great hero like them—but doing so will be no easy task. Tomaszek makes Bolek’s journey an epic one, full of high-minded sentiments (“Each man is from God’s image, has dignity and, therefore, must be protected by a virtuous constitution,” says one of the pancerni) and discussions about honor (“All can be taken from you, save honor,” Bolek’s grandfather informs him). Action scenes are always around the corner, with plenty of flying arrows and galloping horses to carry the adventure along. A few coincidences drain some of the excitement, as does the fantastical nature of the ending, and some characters are so unrealistic that they seem almost otherworldly; Priest, for instance, is a defrocked clergyman who’s not only well versed in Latin, politics, warfare, horsemanship, and Catholicism, but he also reads Shakespeare before a battle. Nevertheless, the story travels well from farm to countryside to the famous Battle of Vienna in 1683—a conflict whose depiction shows deserved reverence for the bravery of King Sobieski and his men.
A grand, if sometimes grandiose, portrayal of a szabla-wielding hero.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-78099-522-9
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Roundfire Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2017
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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