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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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