The prose is rich in platitudes, especially when the underimagined characters are making speeches to each other. It takes...
Historically minded Gingrich and Forstchen (Days of Infamy, 2008, etc.) fix their eyes on the Revolutionary War and the pivotal victory that saved America.
Dec. 25, 1776. General George Washington, at the head of a ragtag, half-starved, oft-beaten army, is about to give his fledgling nation an unforgettable Christmas present. The Hessian mercenaries hired by King George are quartered in tiny Trenton, snug and smug, wallowing complacently in the limited pleasures of the season. Outside, sleet and bone-chilling wind relentlessly punish an exposed Continental Army. Wandering among the soldiers and sharing their misery is Thomas Paine, whose pen has been a goad to British sensibilities and a spur to American unrest. Now, however, Tom’s under pressure. A clamor has risen on every side for a successor to his Common Sense, which sold 100,000 copies and fired up rebellious hearts throughout the colonies. Even Washington importunes him: “You must write something! Anything!” But the great pamphleteer suffers writer’s block until he comes upon a campfire surrounded by a handful of hard-used militia men, including the fictitious 15-year-old Jonathan van Dorn. Suddenly a quarrel develops. Enraged at what he senses is a looming defection, young van Dorn cries out, “You were nothing but a patriot when the sun was shining but now that winter is here? My God…how you try my soul.” And the rest, as they say, is history. Writer’s block vanished, Tom gets his theme, Washington gets his victory and the overconfident Hessians get their comeuppance.
The prose is rich in platitudes, especially when the underimagined characters are making speeches to each other. It takes more than vividly rendered battle scenes to make compelling historical fiction.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-59106-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
An exuberant comic opera set to the music of life.
The versatile and accomplished McBride (Five Carat Soul, 2017, etc.) returns with a dark urban farce crowded with misjudged signals, crippling sorrows, and unexpected epiphanies.
It's September 1969, just after Apollo 11 and Woodstock. In a season of such events, it’s just as improbable that in front of 16 witnesses occupying the crowded plaza of a Brooklyn housing project one afternoon, a hobbling, dyspeptic, and boozy old church deacon named Cuffy Jasper "Sportcoat" Lambkin should pull out a .45-caliber Luger pistol and shoot off an ear belonging to the neighborhood’s most dangerous drug dealer. The 19-year-old victim’s name is Deems Clemens, and Sportcoat had coached him to be “the best baseball player the projects had ever seen” before he became “a poison-selling murderous meathead.” Everybody in the project presumes that Sportcoat is now destined to violently join his late wife, Hettie, in the great beyond. But all kinds of seemingly disconnected people keep getting in destiny's way, whether it’s Sportcoat’s friend Pork Sausage or Potts, a world-weary but scrupulous White policeman who’s hoping to find Sportcoat fast enough to protect him from not only Deems’ vengeance, but the malevolent designs of neighborhood kingpin Butch Moon. All their destines are somehow intertwined with those of Thomas “The Elephant” Elefante, a powerful but lonely Mafia don who’s got one eye trained on the chaos set off by the shooting and another on a mysterious quest set in motion by a stranger from his crime-boss father’s past. There are also an assortment of salsa musicians, a gentle Nation of Islam convert named Soup, and even a tribe of voracious red ants that somehow immigrated to the neighborhood from Colombia and hung around for generations, all of which seems like too much stuff for any one book to handle. But as he's already shown in The Good Lord Bird (2013), McBride has a flair for fashioning comedy whose buoyant outrageousness barely conceals both a steely command of big and small narrative elements and a river-deep supply of humane intelligence.
An exuberant comic opera set to the music of life.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1672-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
With any luck, the Nazi hunting will go on for a sequel or two.
Nazi hunters team up with a former bomber pilot to bring a killer known as the Huntress to justice.
In postwar Europe, Ian, a British war correspondent with a vendetta, and his American sidekick, Tony, have set up a shoestring operation to catch the war criminals who seem to be not just slipping, but swarming through the cracks. The same set of circumstances that led Ian to enter a marriage of convenience with Nina, a Siberian former bomber pilot, has also given both common cause: to chase down Lorelei Vogt, a Nazi known as the Huntress, who, by her lakeside lair in Poland, trapped and killed refugees, many of them children. Lorelei’s mother, blandished by Tony, reveals that her daughter immigrated to Boston. Meanwhile, Jordan, an aspiring photographer living in Boston with her widowed antiques-dealer father, Dan, welcomes a new stepmother, Austrian refugee Anneliese, and her 4-year-old daughter, Ruth. Jordan soon grows suspicious of Dan’s new bride: A candid shot captures Anneliese’s furtive “cruel” glance—and there’s that swastika charm hidden in her wedding bouquet. However, Anneliese manages to quell Jordan’s suspicions by confessing part of the truth: that Ruth is not really her daughter but a war orphan. That Jordan’s suspicions are so easily allayed strains credulity, especially since the reader is almost immediately aware that Anneliese is the Huntress in disguise. The suspense lies in how long it’s going to take Ian and company to track her down and what the impact will be on Jordan and Ruth when they do. Well-researched and vivid segments are interspersed detailing Nina’s backstory as one of Russia’s sizable force of female combat pilots (dubbed The Night Witches by the Germans), establishing her as a fierce yet vulnerable antecedent to Lisbeth Salander. Quinn’s language is evocative of the period, and her characters are good literary company.
With any luck, the Nazi hunting will go on for a sequel or two.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-274037-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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