An engaging, evocative, and informative war tale that will especially appeal to Navy enthusiasts.
A Vietnam War novel focuses on a United States Navy destroyer stationed off the Gulf of Tonkin.
It is January 1966, and Navy Ensign Jon Zachery has spent his first month aboard the USSManfredin San Diego, California, the vessel’s home port. He is the newbie in the “Ensign Locker,” the tiny quarters that house five shipmates. It has been rough going for the insecure enlistee, whom readers meet as he is waiting for his wife, Teresa, to give birth to their first child. Soon enough, the chaos and fear Jon feels during Teresa’s emergency C-section are replaced by the stress and excitement of his experiences at sea. After months of offshore training, the Manfred deploys to the South Pacific. The bulk of the narrative takes place over the next six months, during which Jon copes with the overwhelming assortment of Navy regulations and procedures, deals with his angst over being apart from Teresa, gets into trouble, and finally develops into a respected leader. His slow transformation begins in the Philippines, where he scores in a chiefs-versus-officers softball game—a small victory for the ensign whose propensity for seasickness has earned him the nickname Two Buckets. Arriving in Vietnam, the Manfred takes up a position north of the DMZ, providing support for the U.S. Marines fighting the Viet Cong in the jungle. It is here that the story picks up steam with vividly described action scenes, both in the water and on land. Zerr is a Vietnam veteran with a long naval career. A minimal internet perusal of the author will confirm what readers may quickly suspect—that the novel is semiautobiographical. The first clues are the accidental, sporadic slip-ups in which the third-person narrator uses a first-person pronoun (“ ‘Aa yes hole,’ Cowboy said as he followed us out the door”). In addition, there is Zerr’s encyclopedic knowledge of the minuscule details of life aboard a military vessel. Although moment-by-moment reporting of every turn of the screw, replete with naval terminology and acronyms, becomes occasionally mind-numbing, the author’s engrossing, atmospheric portrait of the period and place brings readers directly into the Vietnam conflict.
An engaging, evocative, and informative war tale that will especially appeal to Navy enthusiasts.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-955177-40-5
Page Count: 446
Publisher: Primix Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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 sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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