A suspenseful thriller equipped with the volatility of a ticking bomb.
A former World War II POW goes on a vengeful murder spree only to be hunted by the Japanese soldier who once saved his life, in Littlejohn’s debut novel.
The narrative begins in 1941, two years into World War II, when American soldier Jack Collins is taken prisoner in the Philippines after the fall of Bataan. Like most POW camps, the one that confines Jack is a hellish nightmare, most powerfully underscored by the Bataan Death March, during which innumerable detainees are raped, disemboweled or–mercifully–just beaten within an inch of their lives. It seems Jack’s number is up when he is nearly on the receiving end of a bayonet stabbing. Amazingly, a compassionate Japanese officer, Lt. Kenji Tanaka, deflects the attack, allowing Jack to live and return to America upon emancipation. Forty three years later, Jack descends on Tokyo to exact a bloody revenge on the men who terrorized him and, as the body count rises, he finds himself pursued by an unlikely adversary: Kenji, now a Tokyo police officer. The novel is decidedly less literary than cinematic, but that doesn’t much matter. Littlejohn hinges his narrative effectively and vividly on one of the lesser-pillaged events of World War II and delivers a nail-biting thriller. The setup is a somewhat rickety but, like any book of this genre, the implausibility is eclipsed by the deft employment of pulse-quickening action. This is a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse complicated by the fact that both Jack and Kenji are fully developed, likable characters. With readers rooting for both sides, it becomes impossible to foresee or want an outcome. Littlejohn could let go of some of the loftier literary aspirations that creep in from time to time–especially the superfluous epigraphs–but even they can’t slow this fast-paced, suspenseful effort. Whether the book falters on its own ambition or not, it proves a rewarding read.
A suspenseful thriller equipped with the volatility of a ticking bomb.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4392-0045-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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