It doesn’t spoil the suspense of this historical fiction to know which side wins.
Germany makes a last-gasp attempt to defeat the Allies and change the course of history, in the latest from Frost (The Six Messiahs, 1995, etc.).
In the winter of 1944, when most Nazi military leaders believe defeat is near, Hitler has Lieutenant Colonel Otto Skorzeny launch a brazen plan. He recruits a secret brigade of 2,000 men, all of whom speak English and are conversant in American culture, to penetrate the enemy’s defenses and lay the groundwork for a final attack. The next step involves an elite corps of 20 soldiers within that brigade, those most capable of passing as American soldiers and striking at the heart of the Allied braintrust. Only their leader, the ruthless SS officer Erich Von Leinsdorf, knows (along with the reader) who their assassination target is and how they will proceed. Von Leinsdorf’s chief aide in this secret mission is Private Bernard Oster, raised in Brooklyn before returning to his homeland with his German parents, and a soldier well versed in the American vernacular Von Leinsdorf will need for the scheme to succeed. Yet from the start, Oster displays divided loyalties, leaving the reader to wonder where his allegiance will ultimately lie as the mission turns increasingly deadly. Though much of the dialogue sounds recycled from black-and-white war movies, Frost opts for moral ambiguity over the standard heroes-and-villains clichés. As the narrative humanizes some of the German soldiers, it details the corruption of black-market American profiteers, resulting in alliances that further complicate fidelities. Ultimately, the plot turns into a game of two-on-two, as Earl Grannit, a New York police investigator before enlisting, and his more innocent sidekick, Ole Carlson, discover the Nazi plan and do their best to thwart it.
It doesn’t spoil the suspense of this historical fiction to know which side wins.Pub Date: May 15, 2007
ISBN: 1-4013-0222-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.
Hailed as heroes on a stateside tour before returning to Iraq, Bravo Squad discovers just what it has been fighting for.
Though the shellshocked humor will likely conjure comparisons with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, the debut novel by Fountain (following his story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, 2006) focuses even more on the cross-promotional media monster that America has become than it does on the absurdities of war. The entire novel takes place over a single Thanksgiving Day, when the eight soldiers (with their memories of the two who didn’t make it) find themselves at the promotional center of an all-American extravaganza, a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys football game. Providing the novel with its moral compass is protagonist Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old virgin from small-town Texas who has been inflated into some kind of cross between John Wayne and Audie Murphy for his role in a rescue mission documented by an embedded Fox News camera. In two days, the Pentagon-sponsored “Victory Tour” will end and Bravo will return to the business as usual of war. In the meantime, they are dealing with a producer trying to negotiate a film deal (“Think Rocky meets Platoon,” though Hilary Swank is rumored to be attached), glad-handing with the corporate elite of Cowboy fandom (and ownership), and suffering collateral damage during a halftime spectacle with Beyoncé. Over the course of this long, alcohol-fueled day, Billy finds himself torn, as he falls in love (and lust) with a devout Christian cheerleader and listens to his sister try to persuade him that he has done his duty and should refuse to go back. As “Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives,” Billy and his foxhole brethren discover treachery and betrayal beyond anything they’ve experienced on the battlefield.
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-088559-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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