In Epley’s novel of historical fiction set during the American Revolution, passions flare and families are divided during the lead up to the battle of Kings Mountain.
1780 was a tense year in the Carolinas; some families remained staunchly loyal to the king, while others believed just as fervently in the revolution. Other families were divided within themselves between the revolutionary Whigs and the loyalist Tories. One such divided family was the Godleys, whose brothers were split between the two sides, except for Jacob Godley, who harbored no strong feelings either way until he stumbled upon a scene of devastation following a loyalist raid on the nearby Pearson farm; a militia led by the cruel Rance Miller had killed two Pearson men for their revolutionary sympathies, leaving behind a widow and a teenage daughter to fend for themselves. Jacob, an experienced tracker, joined the revolutionaries as a ranger and played a role in the escalating tension that culminated in the battle of Kings Mountain, which, although a major victory for the revolution and a turning point in the war, had deep personal consequences for Jacob. Epley’s straightforward prose efficiently drives the plot. A barrage of characters introduced in rapid succession in the first few chapters bogs things down a bit, but once the major players are established, Epley falls into a nice rhythm. The level of historical detail here is stunning, but period touches are introduced naturally and never in such detail or quantity as to slow things down. After the initial character introduction and scene setting, the action accelerates at a steady clip, leading to a satisfying climax. The characters are so well-crafted that it’s difficult to tell the historical figures from those created by Epley, as they all seem fully believable. Most importantly, Epley provides evenhanded treatment of both sides of the conflict. He paints a war fought by real, predominantly decent people with heartfelt but irreconcilable ideas, rather than a black-and-white battle between good and evil. A well-crafted, immersive historical novel, with just the right level of period detail.
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461075936
Page Count: 349
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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