Animates the Vietnam era with sharply drawn characters and intricate storylines.
College friends come of age in the turbulent 1960s and ’70s when they confront their private demons in Sharp’s novel.
With her vibrant personality and strong will, Lucy Funaro (an uninhibited seductress) exemplifies the drive to succeed among the initially idealistic young adults of Sharp’s (The Duke Don’t Dance, 2012) latest. She headlines the cast in a kaleidoscopic review of 1960s politics, promiscuity, rampant drug activity and assassinations. Lucy and her constant companion, Camilla Benenati, both undergraduates, banter with grad students Shane and Connor Stephens and Connor’s roommate, Gil Gardner, at a sports bar in Princeton in the summer of 1963 and bond almost immediately, setting in motion enduring friendships. The group gradually expands to include Lucy’s older brother, Ira; Ira’s girlfriend, Ava (who marries and divorces Ira); Balinda, who marries Shane; and Sarah, married to Connor. The wide-ranging novel supports intelligent characters and a complex, lucid plot. The action continually shifts among the friends in American cities, Southeast Asia, Spain and South Africa. Ira hopes to build a career in Southeast Asia, and Shane accepts an assignment there in 1969 mainly to honor Connor, an Air Force officer whose plane crashed on a reconnaissance mission in 1967; what happened to Connor remains unknown until 1974, when a South Vietnamese acquaintance of Shane's locates what is left of the plane and its pilots. A brisk narrative pace holds the reader in thrall, most particularly in the several chapters that chronicle Lucy’s fate and the hopeless war in Vietnam. It’s clear that Sharp writes from personal knowledge of every locale, as well as of the war itself. In fact, the novel fascinates due to the writer’s skillful rendering of the era. The most intriguing device in Sharp’s prose is the one-line character sketch, an efficient, vivid use of language in a narrative otherwise so dense, it’s wise to take notes.
Animates the Vietnam era with sharply drawn characters and intricate storylines.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492722922
Page Count: 374
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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