A deeply intriguing novel, emotionally powerful and unburdened by cheap sentimentality.
In Jung’s historical novel, a man returns from the Great War to New York to find a violent city, an inhospitable family, and a murder to solve.
Eddie returns to Chinatown after having driven for the Red Cross in France during World War I. He is less than hospitably received by his Chinese father, Fuunwong, and brother, Clock. Eddie is mixed-race and passes for white, a dangerously ambiguous identity during a time of extraordinary racial prejudice. In this gripping novel, Eddie’s predicament is deftly portrayed: “Both sides of his family had made it clear to Eddie that he had to keep the facts of his background a secret. To the rest of the world, Eddie was a mongrel, a half-breed, a cur. Eddie isn’t a man. he is a gray area in a world that doesn’t like gray areas.” Eddie finds a dead Chinese man on 10th Avenue, his body so mangled that it’s clear he was dragged by a train to his death. Eddie suspects the man was murdered—his face looks like “he had been betrayed”—and uses the notebook he finds on his person to discover his name: the man is Ah Fay, a local actor. Strangely, Eddie’s father and brother want that notebook as well, though they are reluctant to disclose why (given their criminal activities, he suspects nefarious motives). The author’s writing cleverly pays homage to the hardboiled detective noir fiction of the 20th century—his prose is punchy and brimming with a hard-earned cynicism. New York City is memorably captured as simultaneously a place of great squalor and hope. Jung masterfully presents the reader with complex moral entanglements and even more impressively resists the facile allure of any contrived solutions to them. Eddie is a man of irresolvable contradictions and a mesmerizingly nuanced protagonist.
A deeply intriguing novel, emotionally powerful and unburdened by cheap sentimentality.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 fresh and clever whodunit with an engaging twist.
A 16-year-old savant uses his Groundhog Day gift to solve his grandfather’s murder.
Nishizawa’s compulsively readable puzzle opens with the discovery of the victim, patriarch Reijiro Fuchigami, sprawled on a futon in the attic of his elegant mansion, where his family has gathered for a consequential announcement about his estate. The weapon seems to be a copper vase lying nearby. Given this setup, the novel might have proceeded as a traditional whodunit but for two delightful features. The first is the ebullient narration of Fuchigami’s youngest grandson, Hisataro, thrust into the role of an investigator with more dedication than finesse. The second is Nishizawa’s clever premise: The 16-year-old Hisataro has lived ever since birth with a condition that occasionally has him falling into a time loop that he calls "the Trap," replaying the same 24 hours of his life exactly nine times before moving on. And, of course, the murder takes place on the first day of one of these loops. Can he solve the murder before the cycle is played out? His initial strategies—never leaving his grandfather’s side, focusing on specific suspects, hiding in order to observe them all—fall frustratingly short. Hisataro’s comical anxiety rises with every failed attempt to identify the culprit. It’s only when he steps back and examines all the evidence that he discovers the solution. First published in 1995, this is the first of Nishizawa’s novels to be translated into English. As for Hisataro, he ultimately concludes that his condition is not a burden but a gift: “Time’s spiral never ends.”
A fresh and clever whodunit with an engaging twist.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781805335436
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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