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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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