by Ken Follett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 3, 2001
Ersatz characters, featureless prose, departures from formula nil. But to the Follett faithful that's probably good news.
Another plumpish thriller from the Follett factory (Code Zero, 2000, etc.), this time featuring a sort of distaff dirty (half) dozen.
They don't come any tougher, smarter, braver, or, for that matter, deadlier than Major Felicity (call her “Flick”) Clairet. Quintessentially female and sexy as all get out, she kills without compunction if that's the way the mission goes. The year is 1944, ten days before the Allied assault on Normandy, and Flick, a world-class saboteur, is attached to a British special operations unit. In France, near Paris, the largest telephone exchange in Europe has to be knocked out if Nazi communications are to be as impaired as the Allies need them to be. Eager for the assignment, Flick, being Flick, is only momentarily nonplussed when she learns she has but a mere two days to recruit a team of six French-speaking Englishwomen, train them to jump out of an airplane, and pass them off as a local custodial staff. In company with Flick, they will then slip by gulled Gestapo guards and into the telephone exchange building in order to blow it to smithereens. Code-named Jackdaw, the hastily assembled team includes a convict awaiting trial for murder, an ex-safecracker with a particular affinity for gelignite, and an engineer who is also a transvestite. Opposing the Jackdaws will be fiendishly clever Major Dietrich Franck, late of Rommel’s staff, who is to captured British intelligence agents what Torquemada was to suspected heathens. And now the game's afoot: jackbooted Nazis against dissembling Jackdaws, devilish Dietrich versus tricky Flick. Bullets fly and blood flows while the fate of D-day hangs, obligatorily, in the balance.
Ersatz characters, featureless prose, departures from formula nil. But to the Follett faithful that's probably good news.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2001
ISBN: 0-525-94628-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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