Brings to life a little-known episode of US history, briskly narrated with wit and real suspense.
Fascinating new page-turner from Fleming (Conquerers of the Sky, 2003, etc.), following the adventures of an Irish lass who runs away to America in 1865 and tries to help the Fenians conquer Canada.
Bess Fitzmaurice was never really cut out to be a revolutionary. The daughter of a devout Catholic mother and freethinking Protestant father, she grew up in a prosperous and tolerant household that had little use for rebellions or ideology. But when her brother Michael becomes implicated in a failed Fenian uprising, Bess steps in to help him escape to America. Her bravery in slipping Michael and Fenian leader Dan McCaffrey through the fingers of the British wins her renown in the US press, and Bess discovers a strange new world she could never have imagined: Irish veterans of the Civil War, funded by wealthy Irish-Americans, have formed a Fenian Army dedicated to the overthrow of British rule in Ireland. An impossible dream? Not quite. Great Britain is widely reviled for having supported the Confederacy during the Civil War, and prominent politicians of both parties, President Andrew Johnson among them, support the Fenians’ plan to conquer Canada and hold the colony ransom in exchange for Irish independence. Bess turns out to be a very quick study in the rough-and-tumble world of American politics, using her fame as the Fenian girl (and her skills in the boudoir) to cajole, persuade, and coerce both the friends and foes of her cause. But the plan fails disastrously in the end, and her brother dies in the process. Heartsick and disgusted, Bess forswears politics and the Fenians and tries to start a new life under an assumed name. She even falls in love, with a high-minded reforming politician, but their happiness is jeopardized when Dan McCaffrey finds her and threatens to reveal her identity. What was that about the luck of the Irish?
Brings to life a little-known episode of US history, briskly narrated with wit and real suspense.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-30644-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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