With pirates named Dog-Leg Harry and Black Bill, what’s not to like?
While Patrick Devlin might lack the comic dimension of Jack Sparrow, he does exhibit a similar swashbuckling (there’s no way to avoid that word) and to some extent charming persona—and of course the story, England-native Keating’s debut, involves buried treasure, daring raids and fights between gnarly pirates.
The action unfolds during the Golden Age of Piracy, the early 18th century. Devlin has only recently become a pirate, a career path necessitated by the sinking of a ship on which he’d been the captain’s servant. He possesses a valuable skill, much in demand, for he has mastered the art of navigation. At a beach on the west coast of Africa he finds himself confronting the demise of Philippe Ducos, killed by a bullet to the brain courtesy of Fletcher, an English pirate. Before his death, however, the “babbling Frog” had revealed a secret involving hidden gold—and because Devlin is the only one who understands French, he keeps this knowledge hidden. Through a combination of ruthlessness, savvy and a strong will to survive, Devlin eventually becomes captain of the pirate ship and ironically finds himself being pursued by John Coxon, his old master. Keating takes us adroitly through a series of Caribbean adventures, for Devlin is at times imprisoned, attacked or otherwise put in the way of various Portuguese government officials and Dutch and French soldiers. (The author even throws in an encounter with Edward Teach, the notorious Blackbeard.) While life both on ship and on land is nasty, brutish and (for some) short, it’s also exhilarating. Devlin reduces life to its essence, for at one point he explains to a Dutch crew that he has “only four rules…Eat well, drink well, fight well and swear to leave me when you have a thousand pounds to your own account.” It’s piracy as the hedonistic American dream.
With pirates named Dog-Leg Harry and Black Bill, what’s not to like?Pub Date: July 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56390-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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