A historical novel that fires off a few surprises.
In McClements’ debut novel, an elderly veteran of the first world war reveals a lifetime of secrets, pain, and regret.
In 1974, a well-dressed man in his late 70s named Sean Devaney is contemplating committing suicide. Patrick Brennan, a dissolute stranger looking to perform a good deed, stumbles upon Devaney and intervenes. Over a bottle of Irish whiskey, Brennan coaxes Devaney into discussing his life story and the cause of his anguish. Devaney begins with his childhood as a poor farm boy in upstate New York. Through a combination of hard work and a bequest from a local patroness, Devaney is able to attend Columbia University with the goal of becoming a journalist. Devaney finds a circle of school pals, and together, they have the time of their lives. Their undergraduate fun comes to an end when the United States enters World War I, and the friends all enter the Marine Corps. Following boot camp, they are sent to France, where they encounter the horrors of trench warfare. Devaney, wounded in battle, begins A Farewell to Arms–style romance with a nurse named Lynn. However, this novel is a bit more complex than the classic war story it initially seems to be. Devaney and his friends encounter heinous crimes committed under the cover of the chaos of war. In the postwar years, the four veterans act to rectify these injustices. The plot is full of unexpected twists—even if they occasionally come about thanks to a deus ex machina—with street fights and armed combat providing plenty of action. McClements’ strong knowledge of history adds verisimilitude to these scenes. While Devaney is a strong, pathos-filled character, many of the secondary characters are thinly drawn, particularly female characters, who say things like “you are no gentleman, but you are somewhat handsome and quite dashing” and usually do nothing but sit around waiting for men to bed them or save them from other, coarser men. Ultimately, though, Devaney’s twisting path and tortured soul will keep readers engaged to the end.
A historical novel that fires off a few surprises.Pub Date: July 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-6826-6
Page Count: 412
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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