A war story that’s less about conflict that it is about emotion.
Lea offers a gripping novel about the difficult choices that soldiers face during wartime.
At the center of this novel is Anson Scott, an American volunteer who joins the British Royal Pennine Regiment in France during World War I. Scott has a secret reason for volunteering: he’s a reporter aiming to get the inside story on the war for his New York City newspaper. However, Scott doesn’t know what he’s getting into: “I told myself I was used to taking calculated risks....I was sure that I’d get through in one piece somehow. Poor bloody fool.” Scott makes a fast friend in David Alexander, an officer beloved by most in the regiment: “As he disappeared inside, there was a great roar of approval from the party.…I thought of how good it must make a man feel to have that sort of effect by simply walking into a room.” Scott takes on another secret when he falls for Alexander’s fiancee, Beatrice Tempest, a nurse. The American soon discovers that he’s not the only soldier there with secrets, and he spends the months leading up to the bloody Battle of the Somme learning about the truths behind the personnel of the Pennines. He also finds a home: “Only that evening I’d allowed myself, finally, to think I’d found a place where I fitted in.” Even those that survive that battle aren’t left unscarred, providing a bittersweet end to that chapter of Scott’s life. In this thought-provoking novel, the first in a planned series, Lea celebrates the heroism of soldiers, not the glory of war. He draws very well-developed characters that readers will care about, particularly Scott, Alexander, and Tempest. He also effectively captures the mundanity of daily life in a military camp. However, this book isn’t a work of military history: it’s a story of what soldiers will do for those they love, whether their brothers in arms or the people they left behind.
A war story that’s less about conflict that it is about emotion.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78-589018-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Matador
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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