An intriguing, if ultimately unconvincing, tale of social and technological progress.
A revisionist history novel imagines a Nikola Tesla invention as good as magic.
In the waning days of World War I, three young Americans meet on a segregated hospital ship. Nurse Alex English, a strong-willed White woman who is offended by racism, finds a berth for the White Lt. Rives “Fig” Harmon in the ship’s Black ward. In the next bunk is Pvt. Elliot “Buck” Bulloch, a Black Tuskegee professor who has just learned that his wife died of the Spanish flu. Alex and Fig make it their mission to cheer Buck up—and Fig begins to develop feelings for the nurse in the process. The three bond over their shared interest in radio: Fig opened a station before the war and he has big plans regarding the medium’s future. When the ship docks in New York, he convinces Alex and Buck to come work for him at Harmon Radio. After a few years, Fig’s father’s old colleague Tesla enters their lives with a plan for an invention that literally produces happiness: the glistening harmonifier. The device goes on to change the course of history—but not without a few hiccups along the way. The story is told in the present day by Fig Harmon Bulloch, the current CEO of the successor company to Harmon Radio and a grandson of all three protagonists, and it spans several decades of the 20th century. Figures like Queen Marie of Romania, Eleanor Roosevelt, and even a member of Donald Trump’s family make appearances. Taylor’s prose is fluid, and the novel moves nicely. But there is a one-dimensionality to the characters that will begin to wear on readers after a while. The protagonists (and the story as a whole) espouse a sense of social justice that often comes across as ahistorical and ham-fisted. At one point, Fig muses: “Alex was different from all the other girls he knew. They were all vapid, but Alex was serious. Alex had tenacity. Maybe, she was a feminist. He had heard of them in college, and she was probably a suffragette, too. Good. If this was the future, then he was looking forward to it.” While some readers will find the re-creation of the period and certain figures enjoyable, there is a hollowness at the core of the narrative that keeps it from feeling substantial.
An intriguing, if ultimately unconvincing, tale of social and technological progress.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-68-918506-4
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
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
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
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