A Russian war story that lives and breathes from a writer at the peak of his powers.
A novel examines civil war and prophecy in the years following the Russian Revolution.
In his Kamas Trilogy, Fleming (Forty Days at Kamas, 2015, etc.) described a totalitarian future that may yet arrive. In his new stand-alone tale, the prognosticator turns his pen to a half-imagined history, a totalitarian past that needn’t have been. Sent to Siberia by the United States during the Russian civil war of 1918, when the Communist Bolsheviks fought the Nationalist White Guard in the wake of the czar’s execution, Ned Du Pont finds himself providing aimless backup for the Nationalists in “a miserable little fight.” In this battle, American troops are expressly forbidden to directly engage the enemy, whomever that is. Then he meets the Maid of Baikal. Like her namesake, the Maid of Orléans, young Zhanna Dorokhina hears voices. As with Joan of Arc, those voices belong to saints, and their words provide not only courage in the face of adversity, but also precise wartime tactics the White Guard must obey if it hopes to gain a foothold on success. “My voices tell me Uralsk must be retaken by summer,” Zhanna tells White leader Adm. Alexander Kolchak. “If not, the Red Army will surely breach our defenses at Ufa and sweep across Siberia from Yekaterinburg to the Pacific.” Half entranced by Zhanna’s spiritual mission and half in love with the very real young woman in his charge, Ned finds himself in the position of helping her fulfill her prophesies. His assignment soon becomes a calling and he tries as best he can to both prevent Zhanna’s murder at the hands of a vengeful religious tribunal—the same fate that befell her predecessor—and to use the connections his family name delivers to secure arms and ammunition for the anti-Communist front. Fleming achieves the near impossible in this long book, keeping dozens of plots spinning while he catches the reader up both on what historically transpired and how different outcomes might have plausibly happened. Character after character is ushered into the theater of war, made memorable, then variously deployed to raise the stakes. Treachery, espionage, heroism, or romance seem to hover around each encounter, and the reader is placed in the unusual and invigorating position of watching history come alive with no idea of how it’s going to end.
A Russian war story that lives and breathes from a writer at the peak of his powers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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