Old fashioned derring-do done right.
Spunky Danes spy and fly beneath the radar of their Nazi occupiers.
Follett returns to WWII (Jackdaws, 2001, etc.), where his patriotic newsreel style may be an asset, setting the proper black-and-white tone for a tale about a schoolboy who sticks a spanner in the Germans’ early warning system. Harald Olufson is the mechanically gifted pastor’s son whose dream of studying under countryman Niels Bohr looks impossible after he’s booted from school for an anti-fascist prank. Harald’s hardshell father pulls the plug on university plans and apprentices the boy to a creepy haberdashery, where he is to ponder the error of his ways. But Harald ditches the handkerchiefs and speeds off on his peat-powered motorcycle to find work on a farm near the little castle where beautiful Jewish Karen Duchwitz, promising ballerina and twin sister of a schoolmate, lives with her very rich mum and dad. Karen has had a few flying sessions with Poul, a chum of Harald’s pilot brother Arne, but neither Karen nor Harald is aware that Poul is a member of the Danish resistance, organized from England by Arne’s fiancée Hermia. Hermia has been charged with finding out how the Germans have been able to render nearly useless the waves of bombers the English have been throwing against them. As it happens, Harald has the answer. He just doesn’t know how important it is. Taking a shortcut through a secret German installation on the way home one dark and stormy night, he noted the interesting combination of three radar antennas and deduced correctly that the krauts had invented an efficient warning system. Getting the secret out of Denmark will cost several lives and involve the evil Peter Flemming, a man with a deep-seated grudge against the Olufsons and a deeper-seated admiration for the Germans. It will also require Harald’s handyman skills to get the Duchwitz family’s plane out of storage and into the air.
Old fashioned derring-do done right.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-525-94689-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
Though it has a lot of heart, this novel bites off more than it can chew.
A spirited woman takes on piloting planes, helping soldiers, and breaking the glass ceiling in Salazar’s debut.
Audrey Coltrane has been obsessed with flying since she was a little girl. When an opportunity to train new Army recruits to fly begins in Hawaii, she takes the job. Unfortunately, this means Audrey is up in the air on Dec. 7, 1941, and finds herself involved in the attack on Pearl Harbor and its aftermath. Determined to continue flying and helping with the war effort, she becomes part of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, a group of women given the job of ferrying planes to various military bases. As Audrey makes her way through the worst of the war, she makes and loses friends, deals with her feelings for a faraway soldier, and learns what it is she actually wants out of life. Pulling from the real histories of WASP women, the book has an air of authenticity when Salazar describes the everyday ordeals of talented and hardworking women just trying to do their jobs in a harsh environment. The novel is incredibly earnest, and there are big ideas on every page, to the point that it detracts from the power of the book. The plot races along without any time to breathe, so characters appear and are killed without giving the reader any chance to get to know them or mourn them. Instead of focusing on one experience, the author attempts at least a reference to most major World War II events. Despite a section set in Hawaii, there are no major characters of color and only a brief mention of internment camps. There’s so much stuffed into the book that it ends up feeling like very little.
Though it has a lot of heart, this novel bites off more than it can chew.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7783-6922-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
A novel that sometimes struggles under its own weight but that’s well worth reading.
Marlantes (What it Is Like to Go To War, 2011, etc.) moves from the jungles of Vietnam to the old-growth forests of Washington in this saga of labor and love.
It’s the late summer of 1901, and Aino Koski is learning to read and write courtesy of a schoolteacher boarding with her family in the Finnish backwoods, his textbook of choice The Communist Manifesto. Soon she’s a socialist, and so she will remain, even as her neighbors and siblings follow other beliefs and courses. Escaping the Russian occupation of her country, Aino and others in her community move across the waters to Washington state, where, despite her hope that America will prove a socialist paradise, any utopianism is worn away by the realities of endless hard work in the forests and mills: “Aksel’s hands," Marlantes writes, “work-hardened since he was a boy, still blistered from the nine-pound splitting maul and eight-foot-long bucksaw.” Aino devotes herself to labor activism while members of the Finnish immigrant community work, build families and lives, grow old, and die. Aino hardly has time to take a breath, but she still finds room for agonies of secret-charged love that stretch out over the decades, until fate finally allows some measure of happiness: “He leaned over and smothered his face in her hair,” Marlantes writes poetically of Aino’s husband-to-be, who has followed a hard path of his own, “and the pain and the disappointment poured out as he said her name over and over." The story is long and has its longueurs, but Marlantes carefully builds an epic world in the forests of Scandinavia and the Northwest, taking pains to round out each character, especially the long-suffering Aino. Drawing on his family history, he weaves themes from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic—as he writes, the paterfamilias has named all his children after the mythological heroes and heroines in its pages—as well as real-world events in the annals of the early-20th-century labor movement.
A novel that sometimes struggles under its own weight but that’s well worth reading.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2538-5
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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