Bloated.
Beaten, battered Berlin hides criminals and secrets from an American journalist looking for an old lover, her husband, one or two murderers, and answers. Lots of answers.
A-bomb development, Russians, and cuckoldry worked well for Kanon in his 1997 bestseller Los Alamos. He’s hacking away at that vein again, but now he's in ruined postwar Berlin where semifamous journalist Jake Geismar hopes to find Lena Brandt, his prewar mistress, as well as good stories for Collier’s magazine. The city Jake loved in its dreadful Nazi days is barely recognizable, with much of it leveled and the Russians laying waste to what’s left. Finagling his way into the Potsdam conference but excluded from actual dealings, the reporter spots a corpse bobbing in a nearby reach of the river and, upon pulling it out, finds the body to be that of the young soldier on Jake’s flight into Berlin, an edgy lad whose encounter with the barf bag may have had to do as much with nervousness as with the bumpy flight. Just as the body is whisked away by the authorities, Jake spots a bullet hole. The search for the assassin merges with the search for Lena, and then, once Lena is found, the search for Lena’s husband Emil, an apparently bloodless academic who became part of the war works and is now wanted for all the wrong reasons by both the Americans and their less and less chummy allies, the Russians. Jake’s reporting, difficult enough given the stone walls he’s running into, turns ugly and dangerous when spunky gal photographer Liz Yeager takes a bullet that may have been meant for Jake while they’re doing a little black-market shopping. Nasty Soviet General Sikorsky was on the scene. Did he direct the bullet? And the American officer who also took a bullet but whose life Geismar saved—was he part of the problem? Sorting it all out will involve an unpleasant congressman, a treacherous but tragic Jewish mother, some waifs, a cynical German ex-cop, and, off in the distance but not to be ignored, rocketeer and future Disney property Werner von Braun.
Bloated.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6422-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hannah, after eight paperbacks, abandons her successful time-travelers for a hardcover life of kitchen-sink romance. Everyone must have got the Olympic Peninsula memo for this spring because, as of this reading, authors Hannah, Nora Roberts, and JoAnn Ross have all placed their newest romances in or near the Quinault rain forest. Here, 40ish Annie Colwater, returns to Washington State after her husband, high-powered Los Angeles lawyer Blake, tells her he’s found another (younger) woman and wants a divorce. Although a Stanford graduate, Annie has known only a life of perfect wifedom: matching Blake’s ties to his suits and cooking meals from Gourmet magazine. What is she to do with her shattered life? Well, she returns to dad’s house in the small town of Mystic, cuts off all her hair (for a different look), and goes to work as a nanny for lawman Nick Delacroix, whose wife has committed suicide, whose young daughter Izzy refuses to speak, and who himself has descended into despair and alcoholism. Annie spruces up Nick’s home on Mystic Lake and sends “Izzy-bear” back into speech mode. And, after Nick begins attending AA meetings, she and he become lovers. Still, when Annie learns that she’s pregnant not with Nick’s but with Blake’s child, she heads back to her empty life in the Malibu Colony. The baby arrives prematurely, and mean-spirited Blake doesn’t even stick around to support his wife. At this point, it’s perfectly clear to Annie—and the reader—that she’s justified in taking her newborn daughter and driving back north. Hannah’s characters indulge in so many stages of the weeps, from glassy eyes to flat-out sobs, that tear ducts are almost bound to stay dry. (First printing of 100,000; first serial to Good Housekeeping; Literary Guild/Doubleday book club selections)
Pub Date: March 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-609-60249-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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