A compelling and historically sound tale that follows a Union spy.
A Civil War–era thriller that revolves around espionage and romance.
Despite Canada’s professed neutrality during the Civil War, Confederate spies used it as a safe refuge from which to conduct their operations. Raiford Young, a Union soldier, is tasked with going undercover to gather intelligence about their plans and movements. In New York, his hotel is set ablaze by Lt. John William Headley, a Confederate agent, and Raiford rushes to save a family trapped by the encircling fire. He manages to rescue the two young children, Beatrice and Frederick Cutter, but their father dies. A young woman, Anathea Brannaman, helps Raiford, and the two of them decide to transport the children into the care of their grandparents, who live in Guelph, Ontario. Raiford quickly realizes that traveling with a family provides a perfect cover for his covert mission. Once in Canada, he must contend with foiling dangerous plots meant to compel President Abraham Lincoln into peace talks and concessions. This is the author’s fifth novel, all of them set during the Civil War. Stoddard Schofield (Savannah Bound, 2014, etc.), a trained librarian and archivist, artfully combines events and people both real and imagined in this volume. Her research is remarkably thorough and painstaking. In addition, the plot propels itself like a cannon shot, maintaining a fleet pace from start to finish. Nevertheless, the highlight of the work is the sensitive and nuanced characterization; both Raiford and Anathea contend with past heartache and struggle to resolve their internal conflicts in order to accept their attraction to each other. Raiford’s wife died just three months after they were wed, and Anathea, who grew up an orphan, flees from a cold, abusive husband who dominated her life. Sometimes, the dialogue can be a touch leaden and overly earnest. Raiford wonders aloud to himself, “Heavenly Father, you know how I grieved when she died. You don’t want me to endure that again, do you?” And the historical summaries that the author provides, breaking from the narrator’s voice, are more intrusive than edifying. Despite these minor missteps, the book is an entertaining, and sometimes affecting, fusion of fiction and history.
A compelling and historically sound tale that follows a Union spy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5049-8023-4
Page Count: 296
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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