A success both as guts-and-glory melodrama and as a collection of eye-opening true stories from the Civil War.
Monumental, bombs-bursting-in-air epic of nearly 50 characters who fight, steal, seduce, scheme, and have the time of their lives in and around Civil War–era North Carolina.
Indeed, you’d think that state was the epicenter of the conflict in this massive fiction whose tangled plot spans only the years 1861–63. But that’s no surprise, given that in his three-volume history, The Civil War in North Carolina, Trotter argued persuasively that the coastal state played a pivotal role in the war. His experience as a novelist (Winter Fire, 1993, etc.) is also evident here, from the cliffhanger opening all the way through Confederate Colonel William Lamb’s plot-teasing final monologue (“He would learn on that day the true strength of what he had created upon these windswept sands and meet the destiny that would be the measure of his life”). The characters, most of them based on actual people, have a regrettable tendency to lapse into history-speak (“The South has an agrarian economy, so every man they put in the field reduces the wealth of that economy”; “As a defense against the full might of the Federal navy, which may appear on that horizon at any moment, these batteries amount to nothing!”), but they are otherwise delightful. We meet sexy female spies, valiant African-American fighters, winsome privateers, sneaky bushwhackers, and a host of scalawags at all levels of command in Richmond and Washington. What drives them into the breach isn’t so much an attempt to settle the issues of slavery and secession as it is pride of country, class, blood, and racial origin. Trotter’s battle scenes, especially those featuring the amazing (and historically accurate) exploits of Union Naval Commander William Cushing and hashish-puffing British blockade runner Augustus Hobart-Hampden, show armed conflict as a gruesome challenge that more often than not brings out the best in those lucky enough to survive.
A success both as guts-and-glory melodrama and as a collection of eye-opening true stories from the Civil War.Pub Date: May 24, 2002
ISBN: 0-7867-1013-6
Page Count: 768
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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