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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
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