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
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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