A few longueurs aside, there’s enough cat and mouse here to keep Cold War thriller buffs engaged.
In his new novel, Marlantes moves from the jungles of Vietnam to the spectral tundra of a very cold Cold War–era Finland.
It’s 1947. Arnie Koski, a U.S. Army colonel, has a delicate mission: As military attaché in Finland, a tributary state to Nazi Germany during the war but now a buffer against an increasingly inimical Soviet Union, he has to keep a bunch of constituencies happy, not least the Pentagon brass. Arnie’s wartime friend, a Soviet officer named Mikhail Bobrov, is now his counterpart in Helsinki, with a different agenda but the same need for tightrope-walking skills. Their wives, Louise and Natalya, who form a careful friendship of their own, share that need, too. Louise is sometimes overwhelmed but no-nonsense, for “Army wives [are] used to getting things done alone.” The soulful, cautious Natalya’s life is more complicated still, for she lives under the doubtful eye of Oleg Sokolov, a colonel in the secret police, who monitors every step the Bobrovs take. For all that, Arnie and Mikhail hatch a friendly-wager plot to race by skis across northern Finland in February, perhaps not the smartest but certainly a suitably macho scheme. Alas—and here Marlantes’ rather relaxed narrative picks up speed—Louise and Natalya take the contest up a notch, with Louise sketching out a press release: “Two war heroes, friends and allies, making money for a joint Soviet-American orphanage project.” When, thanks to subterfuge, it actually lands in the hands of the press and the contest is widely publicized, governments get involved—and, naturally, things get ugly. Marlantes is better than Tom Clancy when it comes to the human element, but he’s similarly fascinated by militaria (“a Shpagin could fire a thousand rounds a minute”) and historical detail. All in all, it’s not John le Carré or Alan Furst, but it serves.
A few longueurs aside, there’s enough cat and mouse here to keep Cold War thriller buffs engaged.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780802161420
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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