Detailed, character-focused historical fiction that offers a new angle on a president.
Cribb’s intimate debut novel puts readers into the mind of Abraham Lincoln during the turbulent last five years of his life.
At the riotous and somewhat-drunken proceedings of the Illinois Republican Convention of 1860, a working Springfield lawyer, quietly whittling, suddenly finds himself hoisted into the air and onto the stage as their nominee for president. So begins the last, brief period of Lincoln’s tumultuous existence. A modest man of pragmatism and compassion, with progressive ideas for the country, he enters the White House with his wife, Mary, and sons Willie and Tad in tow, with hopes of holding together a deeply divided country. But after barely a month in office, the first shots of the Civil War are fired at Fort Sumter, and Lincoln is now a wartime president. He struggles with his limited knowledge of military affairs, turning to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to stem the waste of the war machine while butting heads with the seemingly victory-averse Gen. George McClellan. As he tries to reunite the shattered Union, Lincoln is assailed by crushing personal tragedies. Further weighing on him is the horror of slavery, and he makes a covenant with God to move forward on emancipation. Cribb’s novel stays largely faithful to historical events as it transports readers back to a time when individual citizens didn’t need to buy the attention of their politicians. The book’s characters are nearly all historical monoliths who can feel unapproachable in more traditional history books; here, readers experience Lincoln’s tears at the loss of his son Willie, the active fire he faced at Fort Stevens in 1864, and the magnetic mischief that Tad brought him in the busiest of times. Two meetings with Frederick Douglass lay bare the shared ground between politicians and revolutionaries. This access to the characters—with context including the stacked, empty coffins at Gettysburg before his famed address or Lincoln’s swollen fingers from shaking so many hands as he signs the Emancipation Proclamation—brings history to life.
Detailed, character-focused historical fiction that offers a new angle on a president.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64572-016-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Republic Book Publishers
Review Posted Online: May 27, 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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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