Old pro Thayer (White Star, 1995, etc.) delivers a fast-moving and entertaining (if fanciful) account of how Hitler met his end toward the close of WW II. Concerned that Hitler might be able to prolong an almost-over conflict from an Alpine redoubt, FDR directs the OSS to liquidate the Nazi leader. Shortly thereafter, a hardcase US Ranger named Jack Cray is incarcerated in Colditz Castle, the Wehrmacht gasthaus for flight-minded POWs. After several false starts in the spring of 1945, bilingual Jack stages a spectacular escape from the Saxony stronghold and makes his violent way across a war-torn countryside toward Berlin. An alarmed Reich Security Service frees Otto Dietrich (a virtuoso detective unjustly imprisoned by the Gestapo) to track down the one-man wrecking crew before he can complete his unknown—but predictable—mission. Once in the bombed-out capital city, Jack (who blames himself for the death of his young wife in an auto accident) joins forces with resistance operative Katrin von Tornitz, the pretty and vengeance-minded widow of an Army officer executed for complicity in a plot to assassinate Hitler. At no small cost in angst and blood, the two manage to stay one step ahead of Dietrich, who comes to admire the hired gun's resilience and resourcefulness, while death-wish Jack ascertains that his target is holed up in an underground bunker. With help from a disaffected technician who'll do anything to gain the release of his only surviving son from the Soviets, Jack sabotages the subterranean bastion's ventilation system. In the hellish confusion that ensues, the intrepid hit man breaks in on a defenseless Hitler. Before he can make it back behind his own lines, however, Jack must reach a rapprochement with the dogged Dietrich and the aristocratic von Tornitz, both of whom remain true to the Fatherland—in their fashion. A slick period-piece in the estimable tradition of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male.
Pub Date: Aug. 4, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-80025-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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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. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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