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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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