Rich in detail and rendered with a literary flair, this is magnificent fiction that Civil War buffs will want for their...
Peters (Valley of the Shadow, 2015, etc.) continues his visceral Civil War series with the Union Army’s 1864 assaults around Petersburg, Virginia.
Sourcing biographies, letters, and historical documents, Peters creates a superbly detailed retelling of the Civil War confrontations near Petersburg, bloody butchering that marked the beginning of the war’s end. The story begins with a massive explosion behind Confederate lines. There’s much ugly history uncovered. The North’s employment of African-American soldiers at the Battle of the Crater was controversial, even among some Northerners and Union troops, some of whom turned on the black soldiers. Peters doesn’t shy from relating instances of shocking barbarism, and from there, he chronicles bloodletting at places far from the common historical record, including Second Deep Bottom, Globe Tavern, and Reams Station. Prepare for a narrative of near unrelenting violence, which shifts only occasionally to reimagined headquarters conferences and some homefront anecdotes such as Gen. Francis Channing Barlow’s, nearly collapsed from internal parasites, attending his wife’s New Jersey funeral. Sickened by the slaughter, Harvard-educated Barlow thought "if he ever had a soul he seemed to have lost it" in war’s crucible of cruelty. Peters' fast-paced novel is entirely a story of men at war, from the quiet, calm, relentless Grant to Lee, aware that slavery had cursed the white South, to a young up-from-the-ranks 50th Pennsylvania lieutenant named Brown, worried because he "sensed a beast" growing inside himself. The narrative is chronological, beginning in the relentless summer heat and continuing through the fall campaign. With thoughtful yet candid judgments of generalship and empathetic appreciation for the common soldier’s sacrifice, Peters' descriptions of battle, with blood misting the air and men whose limbs or faces have been shot away, are cringeworthy yet a reminder of the half-million lives sacrificed to preserve the union.
Rich in detail and rendered with a literary flair, this is magnificent fiction that Civil War buffs will want for their libraries.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7406-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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