High-flying excitement that’s missing an emotional edge.
In this World War I–era novel, a British soldier confronts how shameful it is to abandon the honor and glory of his country—and maybe his best friend.
As the First World War breaks out, aristocrat and English public school product James Caulfield joins the Royal Flying Corps in France. Debut novelist Hughes depicts how the flying life during that era was mild to say the least: In flimsy B.E.2 biplanes, unarmed pilots and observers, safe from the maelstrom of trench warfare, gazed down from 8,000 feet to sketch the position of the German front line. The Germans do likewise; often, opposing pilots wave to each other. But then, however, the Germans have the cheek to start shooting at their opponents and—outrageously—mount machine guns on their new planes. True war catches up with Caulfield as his comrades, outgunned by their foes, meet grim deaths. In a hospital after being shot down himself, he woos and matches wits with a nurse who turns out to be a strong-minded suffragette. Sent back to England to recuperate, he finds that the politicians and military commanders have no idea what is really happening in France. Back in action, this time with his best friend from high school, Caulfield is shocked to realize that although the average age within the squadron is mid-20s, everyone looks 20 years older. An urgent order comes for a patrol to check on the presence of a far superior plane, the German Eindekker monoplane. Caulfield faces the twin demons of terror and despair as the enemy greets him. The British planes haven’t a hope, but he can’t abandon his best friend, who’s gone missing. Or can he? Hughes succeeds in emphasizing the individual and technical aspects of the war’s main themes, including jingoism, class distinctions, women’s rights, aircraft development, trench warfare and political blundering. But the tale falls short in highlighting, and linking, genuine emotion and believable reasons for individual actions. The historical accuracy mixes uneasily with an awkward attempt to weave a tale of how ordinary men react in moments of crisis.
High-flying excitement that’s missing an emotional edge.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482590241
Page Count: 216
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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