An engaging, unusual fugitive tale mixing bloodshed and quirky humor with a provocative ending.
A novel traces the life of a World War II German soldier who escapes from a prisoner-of-war camp on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, eventually assuming an alias and becoming a career officer in the American military.
McEvilla’s prologue lays out the key elements of the plotline, telling readers up front where the story will go and signaling that a secret remains after the final page is read. The narrative then details the strange adventures of a man trying to blend into a country and culture he had once vowed to defeat. In January 1945, 20-something Lothar Laumer, a former paratrooper with sworn allegiance to Hitler, has one goal—to get out of a Michigan POW camp and reach his half brother in Milwaukee. He and two camp mates escape via a tunnel and begin trudging through subzero temperatures and a snowstorm. Laumer spots a service station manned by an attendant refueling a car. Leaving his two compatriots on the road, Laumer kills the attendant by smashing his head with a rock, steals the car, and leaves his fellow escapees to fend for themselves. He is now not only a runaway POW, but also a murderer. During the next two days, Laumer acquires a gun, loses his car in a landslide, and winds up traveling miles on a pair of skis. At a highway intersection, he is struck by a car driven by Emma, a blond woman who brings him back to her isolated cabin in the woods. McEvilla has assigned himself the task of keeping readers interested in an unlikable protagonist who is excited by violence and danger. The author succeeds by burdening Laumer with an obsessive fear of being caught, challenging him with the difficulties of learning American colloquialisms (most of which amusingly involve baseball), and placing him in a situation in which he is totally dominated by a powerful, fiercely independent, and eccentric woman. Their ensuing relationship is the most tender part of the novel and results in the gradual conversion of Laumer into Sgt. Vincent Vanderjack, aka “The Dutchman,” who serves in the American military.
An engaging, unusual fugitive tale mixing bloodshed and quirky humor with a provocative ending.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-95-480402-9
Page Count: 301
Publisher: Global Publishing Group LLC
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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