A dynamic, dazzling yarn.
A haunting tale of quiet courage and friendship in the face of racism, corruption and cruelty that runs from the Battle of Antietam to a remote fishing village in British Columbia.
Anson Baird, an assistant surgeon in the Union Army tending to soldiers wounded in America’s bloodiest day of battle, befriends an escaped, light-skinned slave. Suspecting the escapee to be on the run after murdering his sadistic overseer, Baird gives him the identity of a dead Union soldier, William Dare. The story is rife with the horrors of the Civil War and slavery: Doctors stack soldiers’ amputated arms and legs like cordwood; a hired hand mercilessly whips a naked, pregnant slave; blacks, whites, Chinese and Native Americans die brutally. Bowling probes the deadly persistent affliction of American racism with a steady, sensitive hand, as Dare’s contemporaries accept, reject, torture or conspire against him based on their assessment of whether he’s white or black. Following the Civil War scenes of slaughter and brutality, the book skips nearly 20 years ahead and thousands of miles west to the Fraser River in Canada, where Dare has established himself as the successful owner of a salmon cannery “in a world indifferent and even hostile to virtue.” Yet the scourge of racism stays with him like the brand on his cheek that he tries to conceal. When the competing, corrupt cannery owners play the race card against him in an effort to drive him out of business, Dare summons his old friend Baird and fights back, overcoming his oppressors only “to find nothing in life but deceit and shadows” and “something that couldn’t be killed even if he used all his strength.” Bowling has crafted a powerful, beautiful, tragic and sometimes eerie novel marred only by the clumsiness of a few bit players’ stilted dialects: a Scot’s “dinnas” become grating after a while, and a Swede’s phlegmatic utterances sound out of place and awkward. Other than those faint quibbles, though, the story makes for a searing yet subtle treatment of racism, greed, good and evil.
A dynamic, dazzling yarn.Pub Date: March 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1926972435
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Brindle & Glass
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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