by Mackenzie Ford ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 23, 2009
Stiff-upper-lip storytelling redeemed by flashes of feeling and a welter of period detail.
Pedestrian fiction debut by a pseudonymous British historian combines espionage and romance against a World War I background.
The story revolves around a secret kept by its British hero, Hal Montgomery. In the trenches during the famous Christmas truce of 1914, Hal meets Wilhelm, a German officer engaged to an Englishwoman named Sam. Wilhelm asks Hal to pass a photo of himself to Sam, and after the British soldier is wounded he returns to England, looks Sam up, falls in love with her and decides not to reveal the meeting with Wilhelm. Hal becomes Sam’s friend and eventually her lover, even though she does not reciprocate his feelings. But when Hal is invited to work in intelligence analysis in London, she agrees to go with him and brings along Wilhelm’s illegitimate son, who grows up thinking Hal is his father. As the narrative focus shifts to Hal’s war work, tension largely falls away, but Ford compensates with an inexhaustible supply of background minutiae about both the homefront and the battlefield (the latter via letters from Hal’s sister Izzy, a nurse overseas). Hal has “a good war,” achieving success and promotion, although Izzy’s death is a bitter blow. Invited to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he meets Wilhelm, who has glimpsed Hal with Sam and accepts they are happy. But Sam has discovered Hal’s deception too. Will she leave him? Will Hal decide to do the decent thing? The suspense is not overwhelming.
Stiff-upper-lip storytelling redeemed by flashes of feeling and a welter of period detail.Pub Date: June 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52895-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
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SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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