Brilliant, thoroughly readable historical fiction.
In the bitter cold winter of 1950, in the middle of the Korean War, hell froze over for Gen. O.P. Smith as his 1st Marine Division led MacArthur’s push to the Yalu River at the China-Korea border.
MacArthur miscalculated. The Chinese feared United Nations forces would cross into China and responded with a massive pre-emptive attack near Chosin Reservoir. Shaara’s (A Chain of Thunder, 2013, etc.) latest is a novel of character formed in war’s crucible. Smith, thought a plodder by glory hounds, is a master strategist, saving his division—and much of the army’s 7th Division—from being wiped out by "advancing in another direction." There are views from the front lines: in minus-35-degree temperatures, phlegmatic Sgt. Hamilton Welch leads the defense of a barren hilltop against human wave attacks. Welch’s confidant, Okinawa veteran Pete Riley, collapses from malnutrition and dehydration. A doctor gives him a can of fruit cocktail, and he returns to the fighting, feeling "the guilt, the odd need to stay out here, that even if they couldn’t fight, they didn’t want to leave their units." There are also candid assessments of MacArthur, poorly served by yes men and intelligence officers; his 10th Corps commander, the arrogant and pompous Almond; and ever stoic Smith. The communist modus operandi comes through Gen. Sung, a wily survivor of Mao’s legendary Long March, and Maj. Orlov, Stalin’s on-site observer; conversations between them are sharp and revealing. Shaara's pace never stumbles. Weather is everyone's common enemy—the desolate mountain terrain is constantly scoured by implacable winds and freezing temperatures—which is reflected in scenes such as a Marine sharing bottles of whiskey baked into his wife’s homemade bread; a crusty battalion commander rescuing stragglers lost on a frozen reservoir; or Marines treated to hot Thanksgiving dinner only to find the food freezing quickly in their mess kits.
Brilliant, thoroughly readable historical fiction.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-345-54922-8
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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