An engaging adventure and melodrama bolstered by a trove of historical factoids, but a somewhat challenging read.
Macedonia’s historical novel charts war, love, and palace intrigue in the Ottoman Empire during the first half of the 16th century.
Lezhe Haris, né Jadran, the son of Croatian parents who raised him in Albania, was only 11 years old when his father turned him over to Ottoman soldiers to be schooled in service to Sultan Suleyman Khan. He was placed with Turkish foster parents for tutoring in his new culture and taught the skills of war. In 1529, during the Ottoman battle for Vienna, he is 24 years old and has risen to the rank of a Janissary, a member of the Sultan’s elite fighting force. The siege of Vienna is unsuccessful, but Haris performs bravely, and his war hero status results in a posting to Constantinople. Six months later, he is summoned to a meeting with the Sultan. Suleyman wants Haris to tutor his 15-year-old son, Sehzade Mustafa, potential heir to the throne, in the “art of soldiering” and “military strategy.” The relationship between teacher and student develops into a close friendship, leading to the many exploits they share over the years. During this same period, Haris spots Badra, a beautiful woman he helped during the battle for Vienna. Now she is a captive, a member of the Sultan’s harem. Despite the dangers and restrictions that divide them, they fall in love. The author, a retired history teacher, packs his novel with meticulous descriptions of the regulations, protocols, garb, architecture, and effusive linguistic flourishes prevalent in court life of the period. The text is a bit dense, and the Turkish terminology and geography present some stumbling blocks early on. Macedonia’s narrative also contains an abundance of violence, including vivid depictions of weaponry (“These infantry units…clad in short-stuffed breeches and padded doublets, moved systematically into position, easily identified by the turtleshaped helmets fashioned with flat brim and crest extending from front to back”) and battle strategies as well as the brutality and cruelty of palace backroom betrayals. Haris is a protagonist of formidable heroic proportions. He is a fierce fighter, military strategist, and philosophical adviser to the young prince, yet he’s capable of acts of compassion.
An engaging adventure and melodrama bolstered by a trove of historical factoids, but a somewhat challenging read.Pub Date: March 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781945146558
Page Count: 459
Publisher: Christopher Matthews Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 13, 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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