An engaging road saga that hits some potholes—or air pockets—along the way.
Picaresque tour of mid-America in the aftermath of the Great War, bringing together a fugitive, a jaded flier, an escapee former heiress—and a very cute puppy.
Henry Jefferson, nee Schuler, the orphaned son of German immigrants, is on the run after being accused—rightly or wrongly we won’t learn until the end—of murdering a young woman in Indiana. Making for Chicago, Henry runs into Gil, a former Army reconnaissance pilot with a past, and his Jenny biplane. A talented mechanic, Henry offers his services to Gil, who's reluctant to accept until his loner status is further threatened by Cora, who's fleeing her mother’s plans for her, specifically marriage into wealth to restore her ruined family fortune. Mostly at the behest of Cora, a self-taught stunt motorcyclist, the trio forms the Mercury’s Daredevils barnstorming act, named after an adorable stray mutt Cora teaches to do doggy tricks. As they make the circuit around rural Illinois, they encounter criminal elements linked to the illicit booze trade and narrowly escape gangsters, the Klan, and, especially crucial in Henry’s case, the law. When they cross the Mississippi, however, the amateurishness of their act—mostly featuring motorcycle versus airplane races—stands in stark contrast to the magnificence of Hoffmann’s Flying Circus, which features four airplanes in much better condition than Gil’s rattletrap and not just former reconnaissance pilots, but former fighting aces. Cora joins Hoffman’s, followed with reluctance by Henry and Gil after the Jenny is destroyed by a twister. Longueurs ensue as we wait to discover whether Henry really is a criminal, to what extent Gil’s guilt is justified, and whether some vulnerability lurks beneath Cora’s spunkily gorgeous tomboy exterior. The verisimilitude of the language suffers, as too much modern parlance, e.g. “repressed emotions,” “what’s not to like,” etc., jostles against expressions like “the bee’s knees” and “the cat’s pajamas.” The technical challenges of early aviation are described with far more coherence and confidence.
An engaging road saga that hits some potholes—or air pockets—along the way.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7214-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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