Engrossing blood-and-guts historical fiction with a respectful touch of low fantasy thrown in.
An ancient trickster spirit visits a farmer, a spy, and a nurse during the Civil War in this novel.
Under the violent shadows of the Battle of Gettysburg of 1863, Basil Biggs just wants to get home. A free Black man raised by his mystically gifted mother, Rosalie, surrounded by abolitionists, Biggs knows the dangers that Rebel soldiers pose. But for the sake of his family’s livelihood, he must see if anything remains of his Pennsylvania farm. Along the way, he is stopped by a dying Confederate soldier, a man who claims to be the not-yet-infamous Wesley Culp, who was born in Gettysburg. Culp maintains that Biggs’ dead mother told him that he’d “be along presently.” The soldier conscripts Biggs into delivering a letter to Jenny Wade, a Gettysburg resident, and a medallion to Culp’s sister, Julia. This is not the only task Rosalie and Culp have for Biggs, as he will soon meet Union spymaster John Babcock, who has also found himself visited by Rosalie. Babcock seeks to employ Biggs to aid him in gaining valuable information about Gen. Robert E. Lee’s next moves. Babcock and Biggs find an unlikely ally on their mission: Culp, the Pan-like trickster spirit who continues to appear in the guise of a dead man. Meanwhile, a fiery young woman named Cornelia Hancock heads to Gettysburg to volunteer as a nurse at Camp Letterman. But along with the admiration of suffering soldiers, she too will catch the eye of the spirit who fancies taking the shape of corpses. Janoda’s absorbing novel portrays the Civil War in bleak and horrific terms, complete with piles of amputated limbs, the smell of decaying flesh, and the cries of the wounded. The magical aspects of Culp’s actions do not diminish this darkness or lighten the hard truths of the war—this “Changer of Forms” uses methods that are just as chilling and unsettling, respecting the grim history of the times. Historical flourishes abound in the book, from the disgusting racial tensions even among Union soldiers to medical practices that border on the barbaric. The era’s spycraft is heavily referenced, depicting disguises, infiltration, and sabotage in an informative way that never feels inorganic to the plot.
Engrossing blood-and-guts historical fiction with a respectful touch of low fantasy thrown in.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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