THE NAVIGATION LOG

Name: THE NAVIGATION LOG
Author: Martin Corrick
ISBN: 0-375-50812-0

by Martin Corrick ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 29, 2003

A little too pat and intermittently predictable to qualify for Masterpiece Theater. But the BBC should be quick to snap it...

bookshelf

An immensely readable debut, a kind of British Rich Man, Poor Man, set during the early days of the Battle of Britain.

Twin brothers William and Tom Anderson, who will prove quite different temperamentally, are born in 1918 to the sound of armistice bells ringing in the end of WWI. In brief chapters summarizing events of succeeding years, we observe the boys’ childhood through early manhood—often through the eyes of their gossipy neighbors, widowed Marigold Jennings and spinster “Miss Betty.” Corrick overuses this catty pair, though once in a while their pseudoaphoristic observations strike home (e.g., “Devotion is no basis for marriage,” a perverse truism illustrated by the boys’ incompatible parents). Through 1939, we watch William turn scholarly and “poetic” (with a taste for Tennyson), while Tom surrenders himself to the poetry of aviation. The bulk of the tale covers the year 1940, as Tom becomes a Spitfire pilot hopefully pursuing an elusive woman flyer. William, meanwhile, marries an older woman doctor and secures a teaching position at Liberty Hall, a progressive school for preadolescents run by a Panglossian, Blake-quoting obsessive and eccentric neatly named Masterman (“My pedagogic aim is the abolition of irrational belief”). Parallel scenes (often too brief to fully register) detail Tom’s fateful progression toward an airfight over the English Channel, and the mock-Chaucerian “pilgrimage” to Canterbury undertaken by Masterman and company when Liberty Hall is commandeered by the British Army. The introduction of such marginally involved, though thematically crucial, characters as rescued Polish refugee Janosz Pasenik intensifies the skillfully tangled separate stories, which dovetail toward a satisfying close, in a momentarily peaceful churchyard echoing with complex images of death and rebirth.

A little too pat and intermittently predictable to qualify for Masterpiece Theater. But the BBC should be quick to snap it up.

Pub Date: April 29, 2003

ISBN: 0-375-50812-0

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Film Productions Halted Due to Coronavirus Worry

- SEEN & HEARD
‘The Nightingale’ Is Reese’s Book Club Pick

bookshelf

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

bookshelf

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.