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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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