An enjoyable, if uncomplicated, beach read about a novice journalist during wartime.
In this novel, a young woman scores a job as a reporter for a Westchester County newspaper in the waning days of World War II.
The war in Europe has ended, but fighting on the Pacific front is in full force. That is where Marty Gregg’s fiance, Eddy, is stationed, and she hasn’t received a letter from him in several weeks. Meanwhile, with all the young men off to war, Marty has been hired as a reporter for the Port Chester Sentinel. Worrying about Eddy, she finally dozes off to sleep. Suddenly, she is jolted out of bed by the piercing wail of a siren. The Rye, New York, shipyard, which has been producing landing barges for the war effort, is ablaze. With the enthusiasm of a fledgling Lois Lane, Marty rushes to the shipyard. Unfortunately, Ben Bronson, a newbie reporter just out of high school assigned to the Greenwich, Connecticut, desk, has already been to the scene even though Rye is Marty’s territory. Now she must convince her editor, Phil Barrett, to assign her the story. Phil is already disgruntled over having to hire women to fill jobs usually held by men. Over dinner at an Italian restaurant, Phil agrees to let her run with the write-up, but the playboy bachelor has a more nefarious interest in Marty. This is the first adult novel by Tolles, a children’s book author. Tolles’ prose has a vintage charm reminiscent of the era, but it lacks the sophistication of adult fiction. Marty narrates the tale with an innocence and simplicity that are quaint by today’s standards. Despite Phil’s numerous sexual advances, she is slow to fully grasp his intentions. Describing a dinner with him, she says: “We didn’t get off to a good start. ‘Hi, Marty,’ he said when we met and he hugged me right up close. Oh, not good.” Still, the author skillfully evokes the atmospherics of America’s homefront wartime mentality. She introduces a bit of humor when Marty dresses as a man to access the Plains Club for an FBI briefing on the shipyard explosion. And the hunt for the arsonist keeps the narrative engaging.
An enjoyable, if uncomplicated, beach read about a novice journalist during wartime.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62815-915-8
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Speaking Volumes
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 surprisingly sensual sports romance.
A collegiate diver and swimmer secretly pursue kink together, and risk falling in love along the way.
Scarlett Vandermeer is struggling. Despite a successful recovery from the injury that almost ended her Stanford diving career, she hasn’t been able to get her head together, and it’s affecting her performance. Plus, she’s trying to stay focused on getting into medical school. A relationship would be out of the question. By comparison, Lukas Blomqvist is a swimming idol, a record-breaker who wins medals as easily as breathing, and Scarlett has long been convinced he would never look in her direction—until one fateful night when a mutual friend lets slip that they have something unexpected in common: Scarlett likes to be submissive in the bedroom, while Lukas prefers to take a dominant approach. Now, they both know a big secret about each other, and it’s something neither of them can stop thinking about. It’s Lukas who suggests they have a fling—purely physical, just to take the edge off, so Scarlett can get out of her own head and stop overthinking her dives. Initially, their arrangement is easy to stick to, but the more time they spend together, the more Scarlett starts to realize that what she feels for Lukas is more than physical attraction. Complicating the situation is the fact that Scarlett’s friend Penelope Ross used to go out with Lukas, and the longer Scarlett keeps mum about her true feelings for him, the more difficult it is to keep the situation hidden from another person she really cares about. While Scarlett and Lukas’ relationship does begin as a physical one, their deeper psychological connection takes a little too long to emerge amid all the other storylines, resulting in a somewhat rushed resolution. However, Hazelwood’s latest is proof of the depth and maturity that has emerged in her writing over the years, and it highlights her embrace of sexier, more emotional elements than were present in her original STEMinist rom-coms.
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593641057
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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