A captivating chronicle of personal growth and the people and events that influenced it.
A young soldier reflects on his privileged upbringing as he prepares to fight on D-Day.
The story opens on June 6, 1944, as soldier Charles Trammel is preparing to land at Normandy. Through flashbacks, he reflects on his youth, education, and the complicated family dynamics (his father is from a storied political family; his mother hails from a working-class Irish Catholic background) that shaped him. Charles is a privileged teenager navigating bumpy personal waters as World War II approaches. Much of his story takes place at Trammel Academy, a prestigious prep school named for his family where Charles has a strict classical literature teacher in Mrs. Verardi (who will prove to influence him significantly). At home, Charles’ family is often at war; a dramatic dinner culminates in Charles’ liberal mother challenging his grandfather, a conservative senator, who dies later that night from a heart attack. Charles is drawn to his chauffeur, Chauncey, a surrogate father figure whose background helps Charles begin to understand social inequality and the value of character over class. As the war draws closer, Charles finds himself rejecting the expectation that a senator’s son would avoid frontline combat. He joins the military, facing the brutal reality of war. In his final moments before the big battle, Charles acknowledges how the pivotal experiences and relationships in his life have defined him more than his last name. Van Sickle alternates between the fighting on Omaha Beach and the flashbacks to Charles’ youth to craft an engrossing narrative of personal awakening that tackles lofty themes of privilege, identity, and moral courage. The characters are compelling, particularly Charles and two of his prep-school peers, the manipulative and charismatic Jackson Inverness and the gentle and introspective Chilton McGovern (“His father was a first-generation Scottish steel baron and looked like a Viking. As did his mother. And his sister”). The dual timeline works well, allowing readers to track Charles’ evolution as a person and the ways in which the past has shaped his present. Part war story and part coming-of-age tale, this novel is a compelling read.
A captivating chronicle of personal growth and the people and events that influenced it.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9798891326415
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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