An entertaining historical novel about a complicated figure.
Marmorstein offers a fictionalized account of the life of 16th-century naval admiral and Genoese politician Andrea Doria.
The author anchors this story to a single night late in Doria’s life, when it nearly ended. On Jan. 2, 1547, octogenarian Doria, an influential political leader in the Italian Republic of Genoa in Italy, regales his family and holiday visitors with adventure tales. He recounts his rise to military fame and his alliances with kings and popes. He boasts of how, as the defender of Genoa, he initially worked with the French and ultimately with the Spanish when, in 1528, Spanish King Charles V offered the city both protection and independence. Doria announced the agreement to an adoring city, but he refused to be named the doge of the republic. Unofficially, however, he’d ruled the city ever since. Gian Luigi Fieschi, a supposed friend, is present for these stories but then leaves Doria’s villa to start a rebellion he had been planning for months. Marmorstein ingeniously uses a storytelling framework to tell a vivid tale of Doria’s life and times; he does not, however, simply provide a hagiography, as his use of the omniscient voice allows for other perspectives, including some that contradict Doria’s. The author also enlivens the holiday gathering with sumptuous descriptions of the wines, foods such as canestrelli cookies, and the lush furnishings of the Doria villa. He weaves an enjoyable tale, but one wonders how it fits into the Mentoris Project series, which aims to provide novels about important historical figures who can inspire readers to “make a positive contribution to society.” Doria helped free Genoa from French rule but was hardly a man to emulate; he enslaved captives, abandoned towns to enemies, and ruthlessly controlled his city for more than three decades.
An entertaining historical novel about a complicated figure.Pub Date: July 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-947431-38-6
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Mentoris Project
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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