A granular and engrossing tale about the last months of World War II’s European theater.
A historical novel focuses on the final Allied push to vanquish the Nazis in Germany during World War II.
This fifth installment of a series from Marquis tells the story of the war in Europe in 1944 and 1945 from a number of different perspectives. One chunk of the narrative is told through the viewpoint of Sgt. William McBurney, a young Black man who becomes a gunner in the “Black Panthers” of the 761st Tank Battalion, the first African American tank unit. Another portion centers on Gen. George Patton, the famous leader of the 3rd Army that did so much of the lightning combat in the last year of the war in Europe. And a third shard of the narrative centers on Angela Lange, a fictionalized teenage resistance fighter in Germany, one of the “Edelweiss Pirates” risking their lives to overthrow Nazi rule in Cologne. All three of these protagonists face separate trials—McBurney against the ingrained racism of the United States armed services, Lange against the divided loyalties of a terrified people, and Patton against the tenacious forces of a battlefield enemy. Marquis bases his tale on scrupulous research, an admixture that makes this World War II series a thoroughly engaging example of heavily factual historical fiction. And perhaps inevitably, this reliance on historical documentation tends to make Patton the best drawn and most memorable of the book’s characters, although the author is a bit susceptible to hero worship in these segments (“He had long made it a point to dress with military spit and polish, and as he gazed out at the wreckage of war spread across the rolling French tableland, he appeared particularly colossal”). Counterbalancing Patton’s perspective with those of McBurney and Lange allows Marquis to make insightful commentary on the weird dualities of war. McBurney witnesses a human side of the fighting that tends to be missed by the more gung-ho Patton. All of these threads are rendered with a genuinely gripping forward momentum.
A granular and engrossing tale about the last months of World War II’s European theater.Pub Date: March 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-943593-27-9
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Mount Sopris Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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
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