An exhilarating war tale that will please genre fans and history buffs alike.
A small group in Germany aims to stop the Nazis from completing the world’s first atomic bomb in this debut World War II thriller.
As an American reporter in 1938 Berlin, Alexander Drake finds that his chief concern is Nazi censorship. That is, until the resistance cell Black Orchestra ropes him in. The group wants Drake’s help (and his United States connections) to prevent the Nazis from building the kind of world-destroying bombs that H.G. Wells wrote about. The journalist may have a strong incentive to join the cell, as the stray bullet he believed killed his father years ago was supposedly a Hitler-sanctioned assassination. Drake hasn’t been part of the group for long when fellow member Sondra Speier voices her suspicion of a traitor in Black Orchestra. This makes its missions doubly unnerving, including the bold plan to take out Hitler with an explosive. As the years pass and with the world at war, Drake and the others face such threats as the ever present Gestapo and even the Royal Air Force’s bombing of Berlin in the ’40s. Black Orchestra has little time before the Nazis drop their A-bomb on a major city and create unspeakable destruction. Burnham’s bracing story hits the ground running, as Drake pushes through riot-filled streets while Nazi storm troopers attack and grab Jewish citizens. The pace rarely lets up, covering several years and multiple narrative perspectives from real-world figures such as Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Nazi nuclear physicist Kurt Diebner. The equally swift romance between Drake and Sondra, meanwhile, hardly registers with all that’s happening. Nevertheless, they are laudable characters, like most of the Black Orchestra fighters. Sadly, not every valiant member of the group makes it to the end. The author deftly paints a picture of an unforgettably ominous, war-torn Germany: “The air inside the Bürgerbräukeller was heavy with the fog of cigarette and cigar smoke. The walls echoed the clamor of voices from middle-aged Nazi Party members, most of them outfitted in military uniforms.”
An exhilarating war tale that will please genre fans and history buffs alike.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2021
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
