bookshelf

AN UNLIKELY SPY

Name: AN UNLIKELY SPY
Author: Rebecca Starford
ISBN: 978-0-06-303788-5

by Rebecca Starford ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2021

A well-crafted spy novel examines the perils of espionage’s foundation in personal relationships.

bookshelf

The intriguing story of a young woman’s espionage career during World War II weaves in a critique of the British class system.

What sort of people got recruited to be spies by Britain’s famed MI5 intelligence agency during World War II? This absorbing historical novel makes clear they weren’t much like James Bond. Evelyn Varley is a restless young woman living in London in 1939, working for a cosmetics company and making no use at all of her Oxford degree in German, when she’s invited for a rather mysterious job interview. She rapidly goes from typing up reports to infiltrating a group of Nazi sympathizers—and discovering a disturbing personal connection. Starford takes an interesting tack with Evelyn’s background. The daughter of a clerk and a homemaker, she attended a posh boarding school as a scholarship girl, which meant she would either suffer bullies or remake herself in the images of the upper-class girls who harassed her. She chose the latter and did it so well she got into Oxford and became a sort of second daughter to the family of her best friend, Sally—a family that’s one of the wealthiest in England. When Evelyn goes to work for MI5, she discovers others who, like her, are outsiders in the rigid British class system but have found ways to assimilate by assuming an identity, an essential part of spycraft. As the war looms, the challenge for Evelyn is assimilating with people she finds abhorrent. Most of the novel is set in the years just before and after Britain’s entry into the war. Occasional chapters flash-forward to 1948, when Evelyn is trying to put her life back together after some unnamed catastrophe and tentatively falling in love. The book is rich with historical details, right down to clothing styles and furnishings. The plot sometimes slows amid those details, but most of the book is well paced. The novel’s depiction of Evelyn’s career is exciting, but it also suggests the human cost: No matter how skilled her performances, to those above her in the social hierarchy, she’s expendable.

A well-crafted spy novel examines the perils of espionage’s foundation in personal relationships.

Pub Date: June 1, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-06-303788-5

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | THRILLER | ESPIONAGE | HISTORICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

bookshelf

WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

bookshelf

Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Hulu’s ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ Adds To Cast

bookshelf

HANG THE MOON

by Jeannette Walls ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 2023

A rollicking soap opera that keeps the pages turning with a surfeit of births, deaths, and surprising plot reveals.

bookshelf

Historical fiction concerning the intricate battles over succession within the family that controls a poor rural county in post–World War I Virginia.

Duke Kincaid owns most of Claiborne County, both financially and politically. A charming, ruthless autocrat, feared yet beloved, he has three acknowledged children by three different wives (not to mention unacknowledged offspring). Shortly after his fourth marriage, the Duke dies unexpectedly. Although pragmatic, street-smart middle child Sallie is his intellectual and emotional heir, the Duke leaves his estate to her emotionally oversensitive half brother, Eddie, because he’s the only boy. Seventeen-year-old Sallie is devoted to Eddie, who's 13, but after he commits suicide she's torn by conflicting loyalties to her weak but lovable stepmother; her father’s scheming but able sister; and her older half sister, Mary, who's next in line to inherit the Kincaid empire but has not lived in Claiborne Country since her parents divorced. Family intrigue plays out against the backdrop of 1920s Claiborne County, where racism is a given, Prohibition is the law, and bootlegging is the main source of income for Blacks and Whites. Staunch prohibitionist Mary goes to war against the bootleggers using an enforcer who employs extreme violence. Sallie wants to support her sister but sympathizes with the bootleggers—her neighbors and tenants—and recognizes that the family's finances depend on trading whiskey. Defining what is moral becomes complicated for Sallie. So does defining family. Tough and independent, Sallie refuses to let womanhood limit her ambitions as she earns the nickname Queen of the Kincaid Rumrunners. History buffs will enjoy the many hints Walls sprinkles to show that Tudor England is her novel’s template (the Duke’s marriage to his brother’s widow; his banished daughter, Mary, and short-lived heir, Edward; the Kincaids’ counselor Cecil, etc.). Television buffs will smile at the Kincaids’ resemblance to the Roys of Succession.

A rollicking soap opera that keeps the pages turning with a surfeit of births, deaths, and surprising plot reveals.