An engaging and educational supernatural tale.
A novel offers a ghost story inspired by World War II naval history.
Teenager Cam Lund is named for his deceased grandfather Cameron, who served on the USS Mississinewa in the 1940s. One fateful night in 1944, a Japanese “suicide sub” deliberately crashed into the naval ship, resulting in a fire and the vessel’s sinking. In an effort to learn more about his heroic grandfather’s history, Cam and his father trek to Ulithi Atoll—the ship’s final resting place—to dive to the wreck.While underwater, Cam spots a shiny object “calling” him and dives beneath the vessel to retrieve it. He later learns that it is a dog tag that belonged to Mike Bowers, a crew member who did not survive the attack. This realization coincides with a dose of spookiness when Cam wakes one morning to find salty seaweed on the floor. Strange occurrences follow him home, where he sees a ghost and smells oil in his bedroom. Cam links the spirit to the dog tag, and quickly begins researching Mike and the ship, leading to connections he never imagined. With two books in one (the second half is a brief, nonfiction overview of the events that inspired the story as well as information on the actual sailors and photographs of the ship), Fulleman presents an authentic tale about an episode that is perhaps not widely known. The story seems intended for younger readers, which explains the more rudimentary prose as well as the glossary. But the writing is sometimes repetitive, which hampers the tale’s flow: “The colors on the fish were bright, happy colors. It looked like a living wall of color…Then, the distinct gray color of the ship stood out…The color of the fish stood in stark contrast to the gray ship.” Though the prose is sometimes a bit too simplistic, the author succeeds in achieving the delicate balance of faithfully detailing a tragedy while making the story enjoyable and heartwarming. Fulleman clearly has a great deal of respect for his father (who was on the real ship during the attack) and the men who sailed with him. His work will enlighten readers about a historical event while honoring the sailors lost in the assault.
An engaging and educational supernatural tale.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-939986-23-8
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Putnam & Smith Publishing Company
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2022
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
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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