An immersive collection of time-hopping short stories.
Elliott illuminates the lives of various personages from history in this fiction collection.
Famous historical figures—they’re just like us. Take the example of the young glovemaker who falls in with a band of actors when they stop by his hometown of Stratford. After filling in for a small part, his castmates recognize the man’s incredible command of language and offer him the opportunity to step into a much greater role. Or consider the New England woman who, while grieving her newly dead sister, makes an unexpected discovery when sorting through a chest of the deceased’s personal items. “Why, there must be at least forty booklets, each thick with pages, each booklet carefully bound with a string,” thinks Lavinia Dickinson. “She opened the one on top, turned a few pages, and let out a gasp. Poems. Hundreds of poems.” The woman had promised her sister Emily that she would burn whatever she found, but could she have meant these secret writings? In these 10 stories, Elliott offers fictional (or fictionalized) windows into notable lives, shedding light on the exceptional biographies of the likes of Ferdinand Magellan, Ada Lovelace, and Billy the Kid. (In one tale, a decidedly not famous history buff named Bob Mitty goes on a time-traveling reality show that allows him to live temporarily as three of his heroes from the past.) The more compelling stories are those in which the protagonists’ biographies are not as well known, including “The Hidden World” (about Dutch microbiologist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek), “The Charioteer’s Tale” (about the late Roman charioteer Faustinus), and “Thou Shalt Not” (about the author’s ancestor, the Quaker Nathan Elliott, who attempts to keep his son out of the American Civil War). One story follows a boy having trouble at school who finds preternatural confidence after an encounter with Muhammad Ali. While not all of the pieces offer new insights into the figures they touch upon—or even provide entirely satisfying narrative arcs—the collection succeeds in transporting the reader back in time…at least as far as grade school history class.
An immersive collection of time-hopping short stories.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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