Carcaterra (best known for Sleepers, 1995) inserts an American into the Four Days of Naples, when the great port city was saved from Nazi destruction by an army composed mostly of boys.
The Italians made a beautiful film of this astonishing and true WWII story of Neapolitan heroism, but Carcaterra’s new version supposes an American hero, a second-year law student from Kentucky, Steve Connors, now ably serving as an army corporal. Connors is sent in by his commander to reconnoiter Naples, which the Germans have recently evacuated of its citizens prior to executing Hitler’s order to destroy the city. The Allied Forces are sitting on their duffs, waiting for a go-ahead from Field Marshall Montgomery, but the Germans aren’t. Colonel Von Klaus’s Panzer tanks are clanking down the road, picking off stray Italians and headed for what they are sure will be a cakewalk. Corporal Connors, losing his two sidekicks in action on the way into the city, gains a replacement force of scugnizzi, Neapolitan street urchins, and a wounded but still valiant mastiff. By a miracle roughly equivalent to the liquification of the blood of Naples’ patron San Gennaro, the lads—and most of the lads Connors will meet—speak, not just English, but an English that reads eerily like a dubbed soundtrack. Connors himself speaks a lot of exposition, dialogue not being a Carcaterra strong point. Connors hooks up with one of the few adults in town, a clever but cynical boozer with a comely daughter, and together they set a strategy to stop the Panzers in their tracks. The action finally picks up, halfway through the story, with the onslaught of the Nazis and execution of the plan, which involves a lot of sewer scuttling for the scugnizzi, street urchins, and surprise for the conquerors of Europe. Connors and the pretty daughter will find a few quiet moments alone amid the fray.
Past the clunky soundtrack and heroic Yank, there’s a great story here.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-41096-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
Categories: GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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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. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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PROFILES
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
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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 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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