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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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