An engrossing war saga that mixes harrowing battle scenes with resonant pathos.
An American doughboy experiences horror and heroism on the Western Front in Davis’ searing World War I novel.
This story centers on the mysterious diary of a soldier (with the American Expeditionary Force in France in 1917 and 1918) whose vivid account of the war never mentions his name. The diary is discovered in the present day, hidden in a Parisian bookstore, by Alex Grover, an American high school senior on an awkward graduation holiday with his estranged dad, Walter, a retired U.S. Army veteran. The two bond over the journal’s gripping portrait of the war. The diary recaps the soldier’s training as he learns to survive the extraordinarily lethal environment of high-intensity combat, where death lurks in everything from snipers’ bullets and explosive shells to poison gas and, late in the war, the Spanish flu. The action ramps up to the great Allied offensives of 1918 as the diarist weathers shattering bombardments and leads his squad through machine-gun fire as they storm German trenches. Reading the diary and visiting American military cemeteries in France, Alex and Walter piece together clues indicating that the diarist might be the man buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. Davis, himself a veteran, has penned a rousing, blood-and-guts combat narrative, steeped in meticulously rendered military procedure and ghastly carnage, depicted in blunt, visceral prose. (“All of a sudden, I heard the sound of metal on metal. I looked over to the soldier on my right. He just lay there. Half his head was gone.”) He also deftly traces the psychological transformation of his protagonist, who is brave, patriotic, and self-sacrificing but increasingly coarsened by war. (“Once we got out of the building, we laid the soldier on the ground…I didn’t cry. I don’t feel empathy or sadness. I’m mad I’m one soldier short in my squad.”) The result is a riveting tale of a nameless everyman charging through hell on earth.
An engrossing war saga that mixes harrowing battle scenes with resonant pathos.Pub Date: May 1, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 210
Publisher: My Random Thoughts
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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