An often masterful look at one man’s resistance to American independence.
A historical novel that depicts the American Revolutionary War from the perspective of a notorious Loyalist.
When Quaker Josh Lowe and his friend Johnny O’Daniel meet David Fanning, he seems less than formidable—a gangly teenager with a scalp disfigured by a skin disease. It turns out that David recently deserted from a private militia due to brutal treatment by his cohorts, and he is all alone in the world. He takes up with Josh and Johnny even though he’s still being pursued for his act of desertion. He flees north to stay with Josh’s uncle Elijah and eventually joins Capt. James Lindley’s Tory militia. Soon, Whig bandits rob and humiliate him, causing the apolitical David to feel angry pains of partisanship in his heart for the first time. He participates in the first battle between Loyalists and rebels, and he enjoys the heat of conflict; however, he’s soon branded an outlaw and gets captured. He later joins up with a Cherokee family and begins a romance with a young woman but soon finds himself the head of a Tory military company. Still, he’s relentlessly hunted, although he repeatedly finds ways to escape capture by any means available, including bribery. At one point, he’s acquitted of treason and walks away from the war, reaffirming his original neutrality as a condition of a pardon—but he still keeps getting drawn back in. Epley’s (A Passel of Hate, 2011) command of the historical material is astounding, and he arrestingly portrays David’s visceral, and finally bloodthirsty, allegiance to the Tory cause, which begins as an “overwhelming urge for pure vengeance” at the age of 19. The author combines his academic rigor with novelistic strokes, showing how David’s feats on the battlefield became the fodder of legend, even myth: “We did nothing to dispel the belief he was everywhere, unmercifully striking with lightning speed against the foes of King George,” says Josh, the story’s narrator. Epley’s devotion to detail can be excessive at times, and one may tire of reading of the umpteenth time that David escapes. That said, Epley’s protagonist leads a wildly adventurous life that’s often riveting. It’s also exceedingly rare to see a sympathetic treatment of the Loyalist side—fictional or otherwise—which makes this novel an uncommon treat.
An often masterful look at one man’s resistance to American independence.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5351-8882-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2017
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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