Although this current installment is not up to the level of His Majesty’s Hope (2013), it generates excitement as it...
A spy must cast off the black dog of depression in order to return to active duty.
A Brit by birth, Maggie Hope was raised in the U.S. by her aunt; when she returned to Britain, she learned that the parents she thought were killed in a car accident are alive; her father’s a codebreaker for Great Britain, her mother’s a Nazi spy. This information changes her life and commits her to the war effort. A perilous trip to Berlin to deliver a set of radio crystals has left her physically wounded and mentally exhausted. Her mother is in the Tower of London waiting to be shot, and both Maggie and her father refuse to visit her. Two wartime romances have gone sour, so now Maggie is training recruits for MI5 at a remote Scottish house, too depressed to do anything else, when another instructor convinces her to go to Edinburgh to see her old friend Sarah dance in a ballet. The ballet ends in disaster when the leading lady collapses and dies. Sarah and another cast member are detained by the police until both become dangerously ill with the same symptoms as the dead ballerina. Maggie, who has seen similar symptoms in a sheep, is released from her depression by her quest to save her friend. While she's sleuthing in Scotland, the U.S. intelligence services, who have cracked the Japanese code, are blithely ignoring the danger signals of an imminent attack, and Churchill, certain that the U.S. will respond to any attack with a declaration of war, is pondering the moral implications of ignoring the coming crisis.
Although this current installment is not up to the level of His Majesty’s Hope (2013), it generates excitement as it explores the moral issues involved in winning the just war.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53674-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Another tremendous book from Proulx, sure to find and enthrall many readers.
Renowned author Proulx (Bird Cloud: A Memoir, 2011, etc.) moves into Michener territory with a vast multigenerational story of the North Woods.
“How big is this forest?” So asks the overawed immigrant Charles Duquet, who, with his companion René Sel, has nowhere in the world to go but up—and up by way of New France, a land of dark forests and clannish Mi’kmaq people, most of whom would just as soon be left alone. The answer: the forest is endless. Finding work as indentured “barkskins,” or woodcutters, they wrestle a livelihood from the trees while divining that the woods might provide real wealth, kidnapping a missionary priest to teach Duquet how to read so that he might keep the books for a dreamed-of fortune. René founds a powerful local dynasty: “Here on the Gatineau,” Proulx writes, “the Sels were a different kind of people, neither Mi’kmaq nor the other, and certainly not both.” She drives quickly to two large themes, both centering on violence, the one the kind that people do to the land and to each other, the other the kind that the land itself can exact. In the end, over hundreds of pages, the land eventually loses, as Sels and their neighbors in the St. Lawrence River country fell the forests, sending timber to every continent; if they do not die in the bargain, her characters contribute to dynasties of their own: “He wanted next to find Josime on Manitoulin Island and count up more nieces and nephews. He had come out of the year of trial by fire wanting children.” As they move into our own time, though, those children come to see that other wealth can be drawn from the forest without the need for bloodshed or spilled sap. Part ecological fable à la Ursula K. Le Guin, part foundational saga along the lines of Brian Moore’s Black Robe and, yes, James Michener’s Centennial, Proulx’s story builds in depth and complication without becoming unduly tangled and is always told with the most beautiful language.
Another tremendous book from Proulx, sure to find and enthrall many readers.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8878-1
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Even if you have Jackie Kennedy—and this is a particularly sensitive and nuanced portrait of her—you still have to have a...
A debut novelist finds that his book has been acquired by Jackie O.
Rowley (Lily and the Octopus, 2016) likes a shot of fantasy with his fiction—last time it was a malignant sea creature attached to the head of a dachshund, this time it's Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at her day job. A young gay writer named James Smale is sent by his agent to Doubleday to take a meeting about his book, with no advance warning that the editor who wants to acquire his manuscript is the former first lady. As this novel is already on its way to the screen, one can only hope that the first few scenes come off better on film than they do on paper—here, the brio of the premise is almost buried under the narrator's disbelief and awkwardness and flat-footed jokes, first in the meeting with Jackie, then when he goes home to share the news with his lover, Daniel. James' novel, The Quarantine, deals with a troubled mother-son relationship; as Jackie suspects, it has autobiographical roots. But James' real mother is extremely unhappy with being written about, and the two are all but estranged. Mrs. Onassis insists, in her role as editor, that he go home and deal with this, because he won't be able to fix the ending of his book until he does. So he does go home, and long-kept family secrets are spilled, and everyone gets very upset. As a result, he apparently fixes The Quarantine, though as much can't be said for The Editor.
Even if you have Jackie Kennedy—and this is a particularly sensitive and nuanced portrait of her—you still have to have a plot.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53796-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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