Even at the climax, when Fleming finally provides some real action, there are so many competing adversaries in the melee...
More swashbuckling adventures in revolutionary Russia for Charlie Doig.
The opening pages of this talky sequel rapidly regurgitate the plot of its predecessor (White Blood, 2007). Part-Scottish, part Russian Charlie was an award-winning naturalist when tragedy struck in 1917. At his family home in provincial Smolensk, many of his aristocratic family members were killed by evil Bolsheviks. Worst of all, Charlie’s beautiful bride of just seven days, his cousin Elizaveta, was gang-raped and razor-slashed. She begged Charlie to shoot her; he complied. Narrator Charlie’s mission now is to hunt down and kill the ringleader of this act of class warfare, a Bolshie named Glebov. The third most powerful man in Russia after Lenin and Trotsky, Glebov is also a comic-strip villain—nothing necessarily wrong with that in a no-frills thriller, but what we expect as a tradeoff for lack of characterization is plenty of excitement, and we don’t get it. Tipped off that Glebov has gone East to handle the counterrevolutionary White Russians and supervise the Tsar’s murder, Charlie buys a locomotive in St. Petersburg and sets off with a motley crew, among them his new love interest. While he enjoys plowing hot-to-trot Xenia, Charlie is not the stud he used to be; his wife’s death weighs heavily on his widower’s conscience. As his train moves slowly across Russia, he learns of a huge stash of Tsarist gold in the river town of Kazan. Reds, Whites and Czechs are all circling the stash, and where there’s gold, there’s Glebov, so Charlie has the chance to kill two birds with one stone. The long-delayed showdown with his nemesis comes in a Kazan monastery as Charlie’s cohorts secure the gold on barges.
Even at the climax, when Fleming finally provides some real action, there are so many competing adversaries in the melee that it’s not very satisfying.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9651-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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