A genuinely involving example of that rarest of birds: first-rate historical fiction about Eisenhower.
A work focuses on Dwight D. Eisenhower, his wartime mistress, and his wife.
This historical novel from bestselling author Albert (Death in Hyde Park, 2016, etc.), who penned the very affecting Loving Eleanor (2016) and the long-running murder mystery series starring China Bayles, centers on a subject that might at first seem unpromising ground for drama: the love life of Gen. Eisenhower. During the war, lovely and vivacious former fashion model Kate Summersby draws chauffeur duty for Eisenhower in London. The burden of commanding the war effort weighs heavily on the general’s shoulders, and he’s a long way from his loving and dutiful wife, Mamie, back in Washington, D.C. In Albert’s careful, nuanced pacing, Eisenhower and Summersby begin developing feelings for each other despite the fact that he is still corresponding faithfully with Mamie and Summersby is engaged to an American colonel. “I’ve never been in love with anyone else,” Eisenhower writes in one letter to Mamie, after his own feelings have become so compromised that he believes he should add such an uncharacteristic emphasis. After Summersby’s fiance is killed, her relationship with the general quickly escalates into stolen kisses (“For a brief hour, they were just two people in love in the midst of war, holding on to each other as the world threatened to pull them apart”) and a passionate affair. Suddenly Albert has somehow fashioned a mature, gripping emotional drama out of a set of characters most readers associate with bland postwar suburbia. Most of the dense, engrossing narrative splits between Eisenhower’s wartime theater—minor characters like Gen. George Patton are deftly realized—and Mamie’s domestic world back home. Albert is so skillful at creating historical atmosphere and realistic period dialogue that the homefront scenes are every bit as compelling as the ones taking place in the ruins of Europe. The arc of the multifaceted novel follows the three main characters and a host of secondary ones right through the war and back into civilian life, and at every point Albert smoothly incorporates an obviously vast amount of research into a tale of raw emotional conflict that can make for some wonderfully uncomfortable reading. Perhaps ironically, both Eisenhowers remain stubbornly less intriguing than Summersby herself, but the difference remains marginal.
A genuinely involving example of that rarest of birds: first-rate historical fiction about Eisenhower.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9892035-8-6
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Persevero Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt and funny, this enemies-to-lovers romance shows that the best things in life are all-inclusive and nontransferable...
An unlucky woman finally gets lucky in love on an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii.
From getting her hand stuck in a claw machine at age 6 to losing her job, Olive Torres has never felt that luck was on her side. But her fortune changes when she scores a free vacation after her identical twin sister and new brother-in-law get food poisoning at their wedding buffet and are too sick to go on their honeymoon. The only catch is that she’ll have to share the honeymoon suite with her least favorite person—Ethan Thomas, the brother of the groom. To make matters worse, Olive’s new boss and Ethan’s ex-girlfriend show up in Hawaii, forcing them both to pretend to be newlyweds so they don’t blow their cover, as their all-inclusive vacation package is nontransferable and in her sister’s name. Plus, Ethan really wants to save face in front of his ex. The story is told almost exclusively from Olive’s point of view, filtering all communication through her cynical lens until Ethan can win her over (and finally have his say in the epilogue). To get to the happily-ever-after, Ethan doesn’t have to prove to Olive that he can be a better man, only that he was never the jerk she thought he was—for instance, when she thought he was judging her for eating cheese curds, maybe he was actually thinking of asking her out. Blending witty banter with healthy adult communication, the fake newlyweds have real chemistry as they talk it out over snorkeling trips, couples massages, and a few too many tropical drinks to get to the truth—that they’re crazy about each other.
Heartfelt and funny, this enemies-to-lovers romance shows that the best things in life are all-inclusive and nontransferable as well as free.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2803-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.
High adventure fraught with cliffhanger twists marks this runaway-slave narrative, which leaps, sails, and soars from Caribbean cane fields to the fringes of the frozen Arctic and across a whole ocean.
It's 1830 on the island of Barbados, and a 12-year-old slave named George Washington Black wakes up every hot morning to cruelties administered to him and other black men, women, and children toiling on a sugar plantation owned by the coldblooded Erasmus Wilde. Christopher, one of Erasmus’ brothers, is a flamboyant oddball with insatiable curiosity toward scientific matters and enlightened views on social progress. Upon first encountering young Wash, Christopher, also known as Titch, insists on acquiring him from his brother as his personal valet and research assistant. Neither Erasmus nor Wash is pleased by this transaction, and one of the Wildes' cousins, the dour, mysterious Philip, is baffled by it. But then Philip kills himself in Wash’s presence, and Christopher, knowing the boy will be unjustly blamed and executed for the death, activates his hot air balloon, the Cloud-cutter, to carry both himself and Wash northward into a turbulent storm. So begins one of the most unconventional escapes from slavery ever chronicled as Wash and Titch lose their balloon but are carried the rest of the way to America by a ship co-captained by German-born twins of wildly differing temperaments. Once in Norfolk, Virginia, they meet with a sexton with a scientific interest in dead tissue and a moral interest in ferrying other runaway slaves through the Underground Railroad. Rather than join them on their journey, Wash continues to travel with Titch for a reunion with the Wildes' father, an Arctic explorer, north of Canada. Their odyssey takes even more unexpected turns, and soon Wash finds himself alone and adrift in the unfamiliar world as “a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind…running, always running from the dimmest of shadows.” Canadian novelist Edugyan (Half-Blood Blues, 2012, etc.) displays as much ingenuity and resourcefulness as her main characters in spinning this yarn, and the reader’s expectations are upended almost as often as her hero’s.
A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52142-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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