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
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
PROFILES
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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