by Mark James Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 23, 2023
A historically rigorous portrayal of a time of conflict, but that founders as literary drama.
In Miller’s historical novel, a young man is pulled into the Revolutionary War after his sibling is murdered.
In 1776, Josiah Hartford becomes a soldier “quite by accident” after his 16-year-old brother, Patrick, is killed by British soldiers invading Concord in the Massachusetts colony. He joins the Continental Army, bristling with a desire for revenge, and particularly distinguishes himself as a swordsman at Breed’s Hill. Josiah is a troubled man; he got a girl pregnant out of wedlock in Boston, and she subsequently died in childbirth. Later, both of his marriage proposals to another woman, Mercy Willingham, are summarily rejected. Meanwhile, his family is denounced as traitorous and sent to prison by his oldest friend, Hugo Chamberlain, a jealous rival who becomes a captain in the British Army. Josiah finds love again with another woman, Violet, but the relationship is fraught; she’s a sex worker with a checkered past—her mother and father were murdered by pirates, and she was sold into sexual slavery. Josiah is deeply drawn to her but also reluctant to fully commit to their relationship—a predicament depicted in blandly sentimental terms by author Miller, whose prose is earnest but anodyne: “The way Violet clung to him like she never wanted to let him go, the sweetness of her embrace when she gave herself to him, his own feelings of desire—these had a hold on him so strong that he wondered if anything could break it.”
Over the course of the novel, Miller displays a knowledge of the historical material that’s magisterial as he later presents an astute, as well as vivid, tableau of the war in New York, as well as the colony’s strategic significance. Also, his account of the role of Hessian mercenaries is rigorously researched, as is his treatment of the conditions of prisoners of war at the time. After Fort Washington is taken by the British, Josiah is captured and compelled to participate in a “savage, animalistic way of life” whose brutality the author portrays with a great deal of power. However, the book as whole is overly melodramatic; even the depiction of George Washington feels hyperbolic. Josiah is overawed when he first meets him: “He wondered if Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar had had this effect on people.” Likewise, dramatic speeches and declarations abound throughout the text, which feels like theatrical performance for a stage production, as when Josiah stands to his Hessian captors: “You crossed an ocean to fight in a war that has nothing to do with you. You butcher men who try to surrender. You loot and rape and burn. This country is going to swallow you up and spit you out, and you’ll never see your dear, civilized Fatherland again.” Furthermore, the plot is predictable, as it’s obvious from early on exactly how the novel will reach its dramatic crescendo and which two characters will be involved in it.
A historically rigorous portrayal of a time of conflict, but that founders as literary drama.Pub Date: March 23, 2023
ISBN: 9781685131623
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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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
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by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
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Pulitzer Prize Winner
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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