The latest rousing adventure from Dietrich (The Barbed Crown, 2013, etc.) shows antihero Ethan Gage, his exotic wife and a...
An American adventurer and his Egyptian wife join the search for a fabled object.
Ethan Gage was once a spy for the British and the French but is now loyal only to his family. After barely escaping the 1805 battle of Trafalgar, he searches for his wife, Astiza, and their son, Harry, who are working their way from France to Prague on the trail of the mythical Brazen Head, an automaton that foretells the future. Arriving in Venice, Ethan tries to raise money for his search by gambling. He runs afoul of Baron Wolfgang Richter, a card sharp who cheats him out of his money. Ethan steals it back, barely escaping the Baron and his minions as he flees to Vienna. Unfortunately, he arrives just as Napoleon’s troops take over the city. Napoleon, who knows Ethan’s plausible patter well, uses the American's skills to keep the enemy negotiating a truce, giving himself time to gather his troops and put them in the best tactical positions. Hoping to sneak off and continue his search, Ethan steals a uniform in order to lose himself among the troops, but his plan fails, and he ends up fighting in the battle of Austerlitz. Shot in the back by an anti-Semitic French trooper he ran afoul of by defending Gideon Dray, a Jewish soldier, he is saved by Gideon and his peddler father, who take him to Prague's ghetto, where he continues to seek clues to his family’s whereabouts. In the meantime, Astiza and Harry have also arrived in Prague and been granted permission to study at the university by Primus Fulcanelli, a Latin scholar who turns out to be Ethan’s nemesis Baron Richter, head of a secret society seeking the Brazen Head.
The latest rousing adventure from Dietrich (The Barbed Crown, 2013, etc.) shows antihero Ethan Gage, his exotic wife and a varied cast of characters grappling with an especially tumultuous historical period.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-219410-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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