An interesting, if painful, depiction of World War I from the losing side.
A young Englishman is banished to Germany in 1912 and becomes a cavalry officer, but his love for his newly adopted homeland puts him on the losing side of World War I.
The first volume of Alexander’s already-published Schellendorf quartet (The Versailles Legacy, The English General and The Ghosts of War continue the story through the end of World War II) follows the transformation of 18-year-old Eric Foster, son of an unyielding English judge and a German woman, into Erich von Schellendorf, officer in the German army during World War I. Eric’s father will countenance no career for his son except law, and when Eric fails his classes at Cambridge and puts himself at risk of a social scandal, the young man is sent off to Heidelberg to complete his studies. There, Eric is befriended by Gerdt von Wittingen, son of a minor Prussian baron and colonel of a cavalry regiment, who introduces him to the military cadre at the university. Soon, Eric has fallen in love with both the military life and Gerdt’s sister Brigitte, whom he nicknames Britt. The elder von Wittingens smile on the match and assist Eric, both overtly and behind the scenes, to defy his father and remain in Germany. He takes his mother’s name of von Schellendorf—a prized military connection—and changes his given name to the Germanic “Erich.” But just as life seems about to blossom for Erich, the onslaught of war destroys everything he has come to love: The gentle baroness finally succumbs to tuberculosis, the baron descends into dementia, Gerdt is killed in battle, and Erich is trapped in a desk job while Britt is left on her own to deal with the intolerable burdens of hospital work, the administration of a large estate and her father’s madness. This is an often difficult novel to read since readers will have the distinct feeling things won’t end well. However, there’s also a problem with the story itself in that virtually every conflict takes place off-stage. Not only does Erich, the potentially brilliant soldier, see very little action, but the real story seems to be the rotting from within of the von Wittingen family—an apt metaphor for the collapse of their society. But Erich is rarely there to see it happen; he is only told about things after the fact. He labors to make his own way in the world only to inevitably discover that there are forces manipulating him behind the scenes, from family and friends to generals he has never met. Readers might hope that in subsequent installments, Erich can take charge of at least some aspects of his life.
An interesting, if painful, depiction of World War I from the losing side.Pub Date: July 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500574734
Page Count: 366
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PROFILES
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
