An intriguing war thriller hampered by a shaky plot.
A young man of Indian descent trying to make his mark in London’s financial market gets drawn into the horrors of World War I in this novel.
Firoze Hazari finds himself in a bind. He has just completed his studies at Oxford and his parents now want him to return to India to join the family business and marry the “perfect bride” they have found for him. While he’s not ready to settle down, he needs to establish an independent income to remain in London. At first, he finds some success working at the Wilneck Group, a major investment firm. But Firoze suffers from the isolation of a foreigner in a nation that resists fully accepting him, a personal crisis that only intensifies once his company is defrauded. The firm fires him, turning him into its “sacrificial lamb.” Moreover, he frets anxiously about the increasingly inevitable eruption of war. In dire financial straits, Firoze is recruited into The Pannonian, a counterespionage agency, and is eventually thrust into the war as an operative. Chowdhury intelligently captures the volatility of London in advance of the war and the stubborn refusal of some, despite the warning signs, to acknowledge its likelihood. He deftly injects many rich historical details into the story. But the plot as a whole is infused with a didactic quality, as if the author is straining to impart moral edification to readers. This sermonizing earnestness is only exacerbated by the fact that the lesson remains bewilderingly unclear given the murkiness of Chowdhury’s writing. Firoze’s anxiety about the upcoming war is depicted by the author in confusingly muddled terms typical of his uneven prose: “The paradox in his subconscious could not find any way to simply define itself, nor could it be understood completely. A poor tolerance of any rationale to differentiate the racist against his non-British roots, or fascist opinions that comprised of everything he despised, could not be tolerated.”
An intriguing war thriller hampered by a shaky plot.Pub Date: March 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66-321816-2
Page Count: 242
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
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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