A clever, finely detailed historical mystery that keeps the reader guessing until the end.
Seifer’s saga shifts between Nazi Germany and the country’s problematic present-day repercussions as a man tries to piece together his past.
Rudy Styne, a reporter for Modern Times Magazine, has always been intrigued by his past, especially because he has a relative who could be his twin. But Rudy’s doppelgänger, Rolf Linzman, is 15 years older than him. This fact takes us to the story of the Maxwells, beginning in the run-up to World War II; there’s Elias—a Jew trying to pass as Christian—his son, Abe, and their servant family, the Linzmans, Gunter and his grandson, Gunter III, aka Guntie. Elias enjoys a successful career designing and building airplanes, but because everyone knows the Maxwells are Jews, they could lose everything. Eventually (and with crushing irony) the Nazi leadership puts the Linzmans in charge of the company, and the Maxwells must flee for their lives. Casting an ominous shadow over these proceedings is the notorious figure of Hermann Göring, Hitler’s right-hand man, head of the Luftwaffe, and a flamboyant, larger-than-life character whose dress uniform had “so many colorful badges that it looked like a concession stand.” Another standout character, besides Abe himself, is his daughter, Rose, a piano prodigy who, at age 6, manages to offend the narcissistic Hitler at a concert. And then, in a loosely connected present-day subplot, there are evil genius computer hackers with names like NTroodr, T-Dan Mulrooney, and Code Breaker Morant. Sorting out the almost doppelgänger likeness between Rudy and Rolf eventually asserts itself as a major plot thread, and it is indeed a clever device. And the book also serves as a detailed historical summary of Hitler’s strategies during World War II. In an endnote, Seifer separates his fictional characters—Rudy, the Maxwells, the Linzmans, for instance—from the many well-known historical ones he includes. In the narrative itself, however, the author blends fact and fiction almost seamlessly. The subplot with the competing hackers is a tad overwhelming, and many readers will find it hard to understand their machinations. But Seifer is clearly having fun juggling so many characters, time periods, and themes, and his creative energy is infectious.
A clever, finely detailed historical mystery that keeps the reader guessing until the end.Pub Date: April 11, 2019
ISBN: 9781093545777
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2023
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
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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