by Michael Kurland ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 6, 2021
A good time is had by all but the Gestapo in this knockabout demi-suspenser.
An unorthodox pair of English aristocrats travel to the Continent in 1939 in hopes of sneaking out scientists who are crucial to the war effort.
No less an authority than Albert Einstein has written to President Roosevelt urging him to relocate a slew of physicists working in Germany on a fearsome new technology that could create the bomb to end all bombs. So Capt. Jacob Welker, founder of the Office of Special Intelligence, heads into a vortex. So do Lord Geoffrey Saboy and his wife, Patricia, whose irregular domestic arrangements—each one basically provides cover for the other’s roving eye—guarantee lightweight complications. When one of Patricia’s trysts brings her into possession of a list of parties who’ve already suffered a high mortality rate, the couple, aided by a cadre of informants horrified by what life under the Third Reich has become, redouble their efforts to track down as many potentially turncoat scientists as possible. Even as they talk to professors Herman and Angela Mittwark, professor Josef Brun, of the Kepler Institute, is already on the run from the Gestapo with some vital scientific papers. Will Brun meet up with the couple seeking to rescue him as part of the retinue of Geoffrey’s alter ego Jeffrey the Great’s magic act before he disappears himself? Freely mingling real-life heroes and villains with his fictional cast, Kurland resolutely ignores the implications of his title, making wartime intrigue look so easy and fun you may want to try a spot of it yourself in between your own engagements.
A good time is had by all but the Gestapo in this knockabout demi-suspenser.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8970-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
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by Allison Pataki ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2024
The author never finds her subject in this mostly lackluster account of a memorable literary figure.
A fictionalized take on the trailblazing life of 19th-century feminist Margaret Fuller.
Much has been written about Fuller, including a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography published in 2014. But Pataki believes Fuller still hasn’t gotten her due—especially in comparison to her male contemporaries. Hence this novel, which begins in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1836, when the 26-year-old Margaret—home-schooled by her father and highly educated for a woman of her time—first visits Ralph Waldo Emerson. Waldo, as he was known, becomes her great mentor and friend, and soon Margaret is keeping company with the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In this telling, Emerson and Hawthorne are wildly attracted to her—Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is thought to have been inspired by Fuller—but remain tied to their traditional wives. Though not exactly lonely, Margaret, who narrates her story, is portrayed as a woman alone, struggling with financial woes. Yet soon enough she is making a name for herself, leading groundbreaking conversation groups for women; editing The Dial, journal of the Transcendentalists; writing books; and working for social reform. After she signs on as a journalist for the New-York Tribune, editor Horace Greeley sends her to report from Europe as the first female foreign correspondent. Margaret eventually arrives in Italy to cover the country’s fight for independence and begins an affair with a Roman soldier, Giovanni Ossoli, with whom she has a baby. Despite these dramatic events, much of the novel is earnest and tame, the opposite of a page-turner. There’s a lot of clumsy exposition and literary name-dropping, with dialogue nowhere near as lively as the characters speaking it.
The author never finds her subject in this mostly lackluster account of a memorable literary figure.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780593600238
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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by Allison Pataki and Owen Pataki
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2021
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.
Awards & Accolades
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New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
The miseries of the Depression and Dust Bowl years shape the destiny of a Texas family.
“Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times in my journey when I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her 25th birthday, and wind up with her in California in 1936 in a saga of almost unrelieved woe. Despised by her shallow parents and sisters for being sickly and unattractive—“too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself”—Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single night of abandon leads to pregnancy and forced marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. Though she finds some joy working the land, tending the animals, and learning her way around Mama Rose's kitchen, her marriage is never happy, the pleasures of early motherhood are brief, and soon the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all the farmers of the area to despair and starvation. Elsa's search for a better life for her children takes them out west to California, where things turn out to be even worse. While she never overcomes her low self-esteem about her looks, Elsa displays an iron core of character and courage as she faces dust storms, floods, hunger riots, homelessness, poverty, the misery of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and more. The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions.
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2501-7860-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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