A breezy read about a skilled and prolific musician that mostly hits the right notes.
A novel about the life and work of real-life Hollywood film composer Harry Warren.
Raymond, author of Grace Notes: A Novel Based on the Life of Henry Mancini (2018), here focuses on another musician of the silver screen: Warren, the first songwriter to win three Academy Awards. His impressive catalog of more than 400 tunes includes such standards as “At Last,” “42nd Street,” and “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” and in the pages of this novel, he hobnobs with such luminaries as George and Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, and James Cagney. In real life, Warren was a notably private person, so there’s not a lot of existing material about him on which to base a biography, so Raymond supplements his work with fictionalized material. It works, for the most part, although there are moments that don’t ring as true as others; the author’s re-created and wholly invented conversations lead to some hokey dialogue, such as during a discussion among members of the protagonist’s family to change their surname, Guaragna, to Warren. Later, readers are melodramatically told that the first moment that Warren, who was known as Tuti as a child, played an organ, “a ray of light beamed through the stained glass, splashing Tuti in a rainbow of color.” Raymond clearly took liberties with this scene, but some others aren’t as clear-cut. Did a teenage Harry have a chance encounter with silent film star Norma Talmadge? Did Harry learn his true fate from a fortuneteller? One can’t be sure, as no citations are provided. Readers can only hope that scenes like the one in which Warren, lyricist Al Dubin, and choreographer Busby Berkeley put together the song “We’re in the Money” are at least close to the truth. Still, the mix of fact and fiction generally functions well, and Raymond manages to shine a light on a Hollywood great who may be unfamiliar to many.
A breezy read about a skilled and prolific musician that mostly hits the right notes.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-947431-43-0
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Mentoris Project
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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