Well-crafted fiction that offers little-known details about Panama Canal history.
In Carr’s historical novel, a nurse faces danger and unexpected love during the construction of the Panama Canal.
It’s December 1904 when 23-year old nurse Clara Tyler sets out for Panama from rural Cutler, Ohio, because her 26-year-old railroad engineer brother, Samuel, is too sick from malaria and pneumonia to travel home from there on his own. Clara has never left home, except to attend nursing school, but she’s determined to go on the journey despite her fiance Jasper’s disapproval. She already harbors doubts about her forthcoming marriage, and the prospect of moving in with Jasper and his parents “suffocates” her. In Panama, she finds that her brother is so shockingly gaunt that she leads him straight to a hospital, where he soon dies. On impulse, Clara crosses the Isthmus of Panama on a freight train, passing through the jungle to the excavation site where Samuel lived and worked in appalling conditions. There, she discovers that he’d been keeping notes about safety issues. After falling ill herself from yellow fever and recovering, Clara decides to stay, working at the hospital with Army Col. William Gorgas, a doctor who’s an actual historical figure. Overall, Carr delivers a well-researched story of a young woman breaking free from society’s expectations in this novel. Her research also yields appearances by other real-life historical personages over the course of the story, including John Frank Stevens, the chief engineer of the Panama Canal. Although Jasper comes off as something of a one-dimensional character, Clara is a fully realized human being whose relationships in Panama evolve in unexpected ways. Her quest to improve workers’ safety and support Gorgas’ goal of ridding the isthmus of mosquitoes is also portrayed in a believable manner.
Well-crafted fiction that offers little-known details about Panama Canal history.Pub Date: March 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-59152-0
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Bowker
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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