History mingles with invention in a work that’s bolstered by strong prose.
A novel of war and romance at the end of the 19th century.
Set in 1898 as the Spanish-American War rages in Cuba and the Philippines, the story opens with a naval battle involving British and American ships, an occupying Spanish army, and Filipino revolutionaries. Quickly and tragically, alliances begin to fray between local residents and the Americans, especially after President William McKinley’s public statements seem unclear as to why the U.S. wants to occupy the vast archipelago in the South Pacific. American entrepreneur Joshua Armand learns about Filipino culture through his increasingly intimate relationship with Isabella Germain, a Filipino woman fighting for her country’s independence. She instructs him by way of parables and legends that “are larger and more powerful than plain truth.” In this novel, retired U.S. Army colonel Taylor presents a historical tale that aims to criticize the United States’ record of colonization while also portraying a complex love affair. Overall, the author’s writing is solid, particularly when he fuses descriptions of the lush environment with the dramatic actions of his characters: “American troops slipped into the trenches prepared by the sweat of Filipino rebels who withdrew unsure if their hopes outweighed their resentment.” At another point, he revealingly notes that the notion of “manifest destiny” was the “favorite cup of green tea” of Rounsevelle Wildman, the American consul general in Hong Kong. The work also effectively reminds readers of the true history of Americans’ casual racism toward Filipinos, weaving together the actions of its fictional and real-life characters to do so, as when Col. Frederick Funston (an actual military figure who was later a Medal of Honor winner) warns his wife to avoid “that goo-goo girl” Isabella, because beneath her “lovely dress beats the heart of a heathen.”
History mingles with invention in a work that’s bolstered by strong prose.Pub Date: July 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64753-863-7
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Urlink Print & Media, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2022
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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