Smart entertainment.
In the latest from Griffin (Caucasus: A Journey to the Land Between Christianity and Islam, 2004, etc.), a petty criminal flees the carnage of the Great War and lands among con men in the Big Apple, where war of a different sort is being waged.
Londoner Ben Cramb’s crimes were very small indeed—a little boosting, a little fraud—but they were big enough to send him either to jail or the trenches. He and his chums choose the army. All but Ben fall to German shelling. After a period in the hospital where he is mistaken for an officer and gets a taste of a better life, he flees the war altogether, nursing a serious case of what was then called shell shock and is now called Posttraumatic stress disorder, stowing away on a freighter bound for he knows not where. He only wants to get the hell out of Europe. Where he does land is New York City in the still neutral United States. He’s not out of hot water, though. There are those in the city who will regard him not as a victim but a deserter. Robbed of his small stash of cash, Ben bottoms out in the Bowery where he is picked up by Julius McAteer, a professional con man who sees a role for the good looking Englishman in a major scam he’s about to pull. Ben, knowing that McAteer could turn him over to the Brits at any time, quickly learns his role in McAteer’s scheme. He’s the hook to bring Chicago moneyman Henry Jergens into McAteer’s range, where the flush Midwesterner can be fleeced in an elaborate hoax involving Tin Pan Alley. What neither McAteer nor Ben knows is that Jergens is on to them from the beginning, working his own con to revenge his mentor, whom McAteer robbed years earlier. Jergens’s accomplice is his flame, a beautiful actress for whom Ben, like most men, falls hard. When the various stings come to a climax, they involve the war Ben thought he had escaped.
Smart entertainment.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58642-132-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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