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THE WINTER STATION

Name: THE WINTER STATION
Author: Jody Shields
ISBN: 978-0-316-38534-3

by Jody Shields ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 30, 2018

A Manchurian Hot Zone this is not.

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In 1910 Manchuria, a doctor is baffled by a deadly epidemic.

Shields (The Crimson Portrait, 2006, etc.) may be the first novelist to tackle the mysterious plague that overtook Manchuria early in the last century. In Kharbin, a railroad hub under the joint control of Czarist Russia and the Chinese empire, Russian physician Baron von Budberg, the city’s chief medical examiner,, is frustrated when two corpses found near the railway station are spirited away before he can ascertain the cause of death. Soon, such deaths and disappearances are mounting exponentially, both in the hovels of the Chinese laborers and the mansions of the privileged Russian sector. As frigid winter descends, it becomes clear to the Baron and his hospital colleagues that a highly infectious plague has gripped Kharbin. The malady presents initially with mild symptoms, racing pulse and elevated temperature, followed within hours by wracking cough, hemorrhage, and death. The chief difficulty here is that Shields has trouble meshing the disease-thriller aspect of this novel with her almost worshipful character study of the Baron, a humanist equally at home with his Chinese wife, Li Ju, calligraphy lessons, and tea ceremonies as he is with vodka and caviar. Many colorful—or so they are clearly intended—characters cross the Baron’s path, including his venal boss, Gen. Khorvat, and his confidants Andreev, a fixer and smuggler, and the dwarf Chang, a tea master. Although his loyalty to less raffish friends as well as his meditative calligraphy practice may lend gravitas to the Baron’s persona, he remains a cipher. The depiction of the epidemic hews closely to the known facts: the discarded, frozen bodies, the brutal quarantine methods, and the initially scattershot official response. Unfortunately, though, the narrative is nearly devoid of forward momentum. Rather than do battle, the Baron seems content to ruefully observe the plague’s inevitable advance. Potential conflicts, like the Baron’s incipient rivalry with a Dr. Wu, whom he views as a young upstart, are never developed.

A Manchurian Hot Zone this is not.

Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-316-38534-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Jody Shields

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by Jody Shields

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

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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

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

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by Kristin Hannah

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by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Film Productions Halted Due to Coronavirus Worry

- SEEN & HEARD
‘The Nightingale’ Is Reese’s Book Club Pick

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Adaptation of ‘The Nightingale’ Coming in 2027

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.