Fiction book reviews archive | Page 45 of 454

by Michael Alec Rose

Viennese beauty Alma Schindler was loved to distraction by all of the following men and bedded by all but one: Â¥ Gustav Klimt, the most important painter of fin-de-siecle Europe Â¥ Gustav Mahler, the greatest composer of his time Â¥ Walter Gropius, the most significant modern architect in the world in the years following World War I Â¥ Franz Werfel, the best-selling European novelist of the first half of the 20th century Each man provided testimony of one sort or another that a considerable segment of his profoundest art was inspired by his passion for her.

Meanwhile, Alma turned her back on her own promising gifts as a composer to become muse, goddess, mistress and wife to each of them in turn sometimes, scandalously, two at a time. As she said herself, she was a collector of geniuses.

Max Phillips’ new fictionalized portrait of Alma’s life, The Artist’s Wife, is gossip of the highest order, outweighing anything in People or The National Enquirer by a vast margin. It’s all a matter of factual record, confirmed by Alma’s own substantial memoirs, and the only reason Phillips is obliged to describe his book as fiction is because he imagines a few bits of private conversation and relates the whole history to us in first person, through the ghostly voice of the principal figure.

And what a voice! A siren’s voice (“I seemed to have wrecked him with pleasure.”), at once sensuous and world-weary, most delightful in flirtation with her famous lovers, but irresistible in solitude as well. “Death, also, I find to be a disappointment,” Alma tells us, and this expression from beyond the grave retains more of the scent of a Viennese coffee shop than of heaven or hell.

Phillips’ Alma possesses an almost frightful actuality, down to her notorious anti-Semitism, which in real life exhibited itself most strikingly in the perverse contempt with which she mingled her love for her two Jewish husbands, Mahler and Werfel. We see and hear the drama of everyday life as it unfolds for some of the signal heroes of modern art, who had in common not only Alma, but also the rare ability to transcend in their work the kind of sordid history she records in these pages. With searing irony, Max Phillips has turned the forgettable chaff of their lives into spun gold, the very hue of Alma Schindler’s glorious hair.

Michael Alec Rose is an associate professor at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

Fiction, Popular Fiction

Fiction Popular Fiction

Other Birds

Review by Freya Sachs

by Freya Sachs

What does it mean for a story’s setting to really act as an additional character? It can’t just be a well-defined place where players act out their roles. Rather, it must feel like an extra layer where secrets might be kept—and possibly revealed. An apartment building on Mallow Island, South Carolina, beautifully illustrates this principle in Sarah Addison Allen’s sixth novel, Other Birds.

Zoey never felt at home with her father and stepmother in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so after turning 18, she moves to the island to live in the apartment left by her late mother. Zoey finds herself at the Dellawisp, a quirky old building that hosts a flock of nosy, noisy birds for which it is named. So, too, has it become a home for a number of interesting people. From Zoey’s artist neighbor, Charlotte, to the property manager, Frasier, each tenant of the Dellawisp is haunted by ghosts—of who they were, whom they love, pasts they don’t understand or want to flee. In time, each resident seeks to be understood, to build connections with one another and to understand how their lives are intertwined.

Magical elements are hewn into the marrow of Other Birds. Ghosts and birds—imagined or real, but all mysterious—guide the meandering cast, allowing opportunities for joyful circumstances. The fictional dellawisps—curious, loud and loitering—shape both the setting and how the characters interact within it. Zoey even has a bird named Pigeon that only she can see. Pigeon prods and cajoles Zoey, helping her grow.

If you’re looking for a bit of mystery, whimsical characters and a keen sense of place, Other Birds offers all these delights and more. Allen immerses readers in this island world, as well as in the process of self-discovery, the experiences of being haunted and the gift of surrendering to what we can and cannot control.

If you're looking for a bit of mystery, whimsical characters and a keen sense of place, Other Birds offers all these delights and more.

Fiction, Women's Fiction

Fiction Women's Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Amy Scribner

his wife of 20 years succumbs to cancer, Robin Meredith retreats into the exhausting but familiar work of tending his English farm. He can’t eat anything more substantial than a hunk of cheese. He doesn’t know how to comfort his grieving daughter, Judy, who has moved to London to escape the rural life her California-born mother disliked. He swats at a nagging feeling that his wife never really loved him.

No sooner have they buried her than Robin’s brother Joe dies. It’s an unexpected, violent death that throws the entire extended family into emotional and financial turmoil and leaves them turning to a stunned Robin for help. Naturally, Robin struggles in his newfound role as man of the family, making awkward attempts to comfort a distraught sister-in-law and his aging parents. He deals with the pressure and his own repressed grief by stumbling into an affair with Zoe, his daughter’s 20-something friend. The unnervingly perceptive Zoe is a less-than-welcome addition at Tideswell Farm, but she gradually charms the entire Meredith family even Robin’s stubborn, unyielding mother and encourages them to create their own changes rather than accept those thrust upon them.

Joanna Trollope’s writing once again shines as she explores the dynamics of loss in an unsuspecting family. As always, Trollope fills her novel with believable characters who say realistic things and live sloppy, imperfect lives like the rest of us. Even 4-year-old Hughie’s voice rings true; his quietly willful way of coping with his father’s death provides some of the most poignant moments in the book. And Zoe, with her piercings, purple hair and black clothes, should be the last person who catches the eye of a mourning middle-aged farmer. Yet through Trollope’s words, their relationship unfolds as naturally as the grief loosening its grip on the family. Trollope excels at detailing ordinary, everyday life, then hurling life-changing twists at her characters without the slightest hint of melodrama or speciousness. Perhaps even more admirable is the restraint she shows by not whitewashing her stories. You come away from this book without an entirely happy ending, but somehow that makes it all the more satisfying.

Amy Scribner is a writer in Washington, D.C.

his wife of 20 years succumbs to cancer, Robin Meredith retreats into the exhausting but familiar work of tending his English farm. He can't eat anything more substantial than a hunk of cheese. He doesn't know how to comfort his grieving daughter, Judy, who has…

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Lessons

Review by Michael Magras

by Michael Magras

Some people never learn, or so history would suggest. One doesn’t have to look hard to find repeated patterns that can cause lingering trauma, from interpersonal cruelties to larger events such as wars and other human-made disasters. This is just the sort of material that Ian McEwan—that eloquent virtuoso at mining life’s barbarities—likes to exploit for narrative effect, and he does so yet again in Lessons, a scathing novel about the ways brutality, intentional or otherwise, can shape a life.

The life at the center of this exceptional work is that of Roland Baines. At the start of the novel, it’s the late 1950s, when Roland is n 11. His parents, a tough-love father who was an infantryman in Scotland and a mother who betrayed her first husband, have sent him 2,000 miles away from their home in North Africa to attend boarding school in England.

Among Roland’s formative experiences are the overtures, musical as well as physical, of a piano teacher in her 20s. “This was insomniac memory, not a dream,” Roland says of his adult recollections of those days, among them the time she pinched his bare thigh after he made a mistake while performing a piece from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, leaving a “secret oval mark.”

Young Roland’s relationship with his teacher progresses in unsettling ways, but an equally disfiguring scar appears later. His wife, Alissa, whom he met in 1977 after enrolling in her German language class, abandons him and their 7-month-old son because, as she puts it (with shades of Doris Lessing), motherhood “would’ve sunk me” and kept her from becoming “the greatest novelist of her generation.”

McEwan’s novel moves back and forth in time to record the salient events of Roland’s life: adapting to single parenthood, eking out a living as a lounge pianist, learning of his and Alissa’s families’ pasts and more. As McEwan recounts seven decades of Roland’s life, the author places his character’s personal events in a global context and focuses on such international milestones as the Cuban missile crisis, the disaster at Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lessons is designed to unsettle, which is nothing new for McEwan. Although some readers may disagree, the novel posits that knaves and heroes come in all guises, and that everyone is capable of lies, predation and selfishness. The book has moments of warmth that are surprising in a work from McEwan, but there’s plenty of his classic cruelty, too, perpetrated by men and women alike. Lessons may not be optimistic, but as Roland notes, “Only the backward look, the well-researched history could tell peaks and troughs from portals.” Which is another way of saying that, with enough hindsight and sentience, there’s a chance that mistakes can be corrected and lessons learned.

Although some readers may disagree, Ian McEwan's scathing, unsettling novel posits that knaves and heroes come in all guises, and that everyone is capable of lies, predation and selfishness.

Fiction, Women's Fiction

Fiction Women's Fiction

The dynamics of loss

Review by bookpagedev

by Amy Scribner

When his wife of 20 years succumbs to cancer, Robin Meredith retreats into the exhausting but familiar work of tending his English farm. He can’t eat anything more substantial than a hunk of cheese. He doesn’t know how to comfort his grieving daughter, Judy, who has moved to London to escape the rural life her California-born mother disliked. He swats at a nagging feeling that his wife never really loved him.

The unnervingly perceptive Zoe is a less-than-welcome addition at Tideswell Farm, but she gradually charms the entire Meredith family—even Robin’s stubborn, unyielding mother—and encourages them to create their own changes rather than accept those thrust upon them.

Trollope excels at detailing ordinary, everyday life, then hurling life-changing twists at her characters without the slightest hint of melodrama or speciousness. Perhaps even more admirable is the restraint she shows by not whitewashing her stories. You come away from this book without an entirely happy ending, but somehow that makes it all the more satisfying.

Amy Scribner is a writer in Washington, D.C.

When his wife of 20 years succumbs to cancer, Robin Meredith retreats into the exhausting but familiar work of tending his English farm. He can't eat anything more substantial than a hunk of cheese. He doesn't know how to comfort his grieving daughter, Judy, who…

Family Drama, Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction Family Drama

On the Rooftop

Review by Langston Collin Wilkins

by Langston Collin Wilkins

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s third novel, On the Rooftop, is a creative exploration of family, community and resilience set in San Francisco’s historically Black Fillmore neighborhood in the 1950s.

Told from multiple perspectives, the novel centers on Vivian, who came to San Francisco from New Orleans after the death of her husband, the father of her children. She works a good job as a medical assistant, but past traumas and current precariousness prevent her from feeling true comfort. She puts most of her energy toward shepherding the singing careers of her three daughters, Ruth, Esther and Chloe, who perform as a group called the Salvations. Vivian dreams of more for her daughters and tirelessly pushes them to practice on their building’s rooftop in preparation for their shows at the Champagne Supper Club.

September cover image — Read more: Our September issue’s cover feature on Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author of ‘On the Rooftop.’

Vivian’s daughters have their own dreams, however. Their mother believes the eldest, Ruth, has the most star potential, but Ruth’s hopes are a bit more modest. Middle daughter Esther is searching for her own voice while grappling with past traumas. Chloe, the overlooked youngest, is grasping for recognition in both her professional life and personal relationships. Amid all this, their Fillmore neighborhood is being threatened by an urban renewal program that would dismantle the physical and symbolic community.

Loosely inspired by Fiddler on the Roof, On the Rooftop is a refreshing work of historical fiction that provides a window into Black life outside of the direct prism of racist oppression. While the specters of racism are present in the story, Sexton chooses to center themes of motherhood, memory, music and hope. She has carefully imagined a compelling social world built on the very real cultural dynamics of the legendary Fillmore neighborhood, known as the “Harlem of the West” for the vibrant Black community within its borders.

On the Rooftop is a quiet page turner that can serve as a beacon of hope in any trying time.

Fiction

Fiction

The Yokota Officers Club

Review by bookpagedev

by Sarah Bird is a book of incisive wit and poignancy that uses an astonishing clarity of detail in painting its picture of military family life. Through the eyes of narrator Bernie Root, a survivor of the unsettled existence of a military brat, the reader experiences life on a U.

S. military outpost in Japan during the Vietnam War, and in flashback, during the days following the Korean War, when the Cold War was just getting into full swing. Perhaps one should say the reader experiences this life through Bernie’s nose and voice rather than her eyes. Bird excels at injecting not just the visual details, but also the smells and sounds of post-war Japan. Through odors that serve as the title of each succeeding chapter, and through Bernie’s incredibly truthful and true-to-life voice, the novel finds its emotional center.

Bernie, short for Bernadette Marie, is the oldest of six children of her once-beautiful mother, Moe, and her former spy pilot father. She flies to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, and finds that the short year she has been away at college has allowed her the distance to see the disintegrating tangle of ties binding together her once-close family. Bernie begins to realize that the problems of her mother and father began 10 years earlier, during her father’s first tour of duty in Japan. She sees that at the center of this entropic mess is a secret involving the family’s former maid, Fumiko. Bernie stumbles upon answers as she embarks upon a tour of Japanese air bases with a third-rate comic, her prize for winning a dance contest. Bird says this book is a “big, gushy valentine to military families,” and she has the first-hand knowledge to back up that claim, having been raised in a large military family herself. Her novel is about the incredible stress put on the fathers, mothers and children who must all do their jobs to represent the United States. It’s about living a life ostracized from the norm of every other U.

S. civilian and finding the inclusion yearned for only within the family. And it’s about how tenuous yet tenacious love is in such an environment.

This bittersweet comic novel is not a beach book, but it should be on every reader’s list of must-haves for the summer.

Bonnie Arant Ertelt is a writer and editor in Nashville.

Fiction

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Deborah Hopkinson

arie Brown, the heroine of Jenny McPhee’s clever debut novel, The Center of Things, is tall (she compares herself to Olive Oyl), unmarried, deaf in one ear and agonizingly early for every appointment. Marie has an estranged brother, a passion for old movies and an inexplicable compulsion to finish her philosophy of science paper, begun 15 years before during a brief, unsuccessful stint in grad school.

If she can just finish the paper, Marie thinks, she can discover her true self and make sense of the world.

Marie’s obsession leads her to spend long hours at the public library, where she meets the mysterious (and shorter) Marco, a “freelance intellectual” who habitually wears a loose blue suit which, Marie conjectures, might be either pajamas or a Chinese Communist Party uniform.

As if Marie doesn’t have enough going on, she’s also on the brink of her first big career break in her chosen field: tabloid journalism. For the past 10 years she’s worked at the Gotham City Star, “Manhattan’s only remaining evening tabloid.” When Marie’s childhood idol, film star Nora Mars (the girl next door gone awry), slips into a coma, Marie begs for the chance to write her first solo article. And so Marie sets out to discover the deep, dark secrets in the life of the former movie star, famous for such lines as, “The more I get to know other people, the better I like myself.” Part mystery, part comedy, part love story and part science lesson, The Center of Things bursts with quirky characters, entertaining references to old movies real and imagined, and ideas about the nature of the universe. Can a tabloid journalist who looks like Olive Oyl and thinks like Carl Sagan ever find love and happiness? In the affectionate universe created by author Jenny McPhee (whose father is writer John McPhee), even the most implausible things become possible. Besides, as the infamous Nora Mars once said, “Every story is a love story.” When she is not writing books for children, Deborah Hopkinson watches old movies in Walla Walla, Washington.

arie Brown, the heroine of Jenny McPhee's clever debut novel, The Center of Things, is tall (she compares herself to Olive Oyl), unmarried, deaf in one ear and agonizingly early for every appointment. Marie has an estranged brother, a passion for old movies and an…

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Mary Garrett

he 18th century was an age like no other. Cold blooded and cynical on the one hand and touchingly optimistic on the other, it was a time of social, scientific and political upheaval. The Music of the Spheres, Elizabeth Redfern’s first novel, combines the elements of mystery and history to produce a masterful piece of period suspense fiction set against the aftermath of the French Revolution.

When the monarchy toppled in France, no crowned head in Europe rested easy without a network of espionage agents. England was no exception, with its own spies and rumors of foreign agents who infiltrated every walk of life to lay the groundwork for a French invasion.

Redfern’s central character is Home Office agent Jonathan Absey, a spy-catcher who had served his country well in hunting down England’s enemies. His inside track to promotion and his peace of mind are destroyed by the murder of his 15-year-old daughter, Ellie; catching her killer becomes his reason for living. Jonathan loses his balance on the tightrope between personal and professional duty when a series of murders of red-haired young women, so painfully reminiscent of his daughter, point not only to French spies but to a sadistic killer in their midst. In order to solve the mystery of his daughter’s death, Jonathan must track down the murderer of the other girls. The trail leads him to a group of French expatriates and their British friends, amateur astronomers who hide their personal demons behind a faÂade of scientific fascination with the mysteries of the solar system. Jonathan’s intuition tells him that this seemingly harmless group of stargazers conceals spies, possibly traitors, and almost assuredly, a psychotic killer.

Like Patrick Suskind’s Perfume and David Liss’ A Conspiracy of Paper, this intensely atmospheric historical suspense novel is alive with the sights and sounds of the day. The author’s years of research allow her to draw on a wealth of period detail from 18th century medicine, mathematics, astronomy and the British government’s secret intelligence network, including the science of encryption. Solidly grounded in the history of a perilous time, the novel’s imagery and characterization bring 18th century London to life with its contrasts of wealth and squalor, poverty and power, and people it with a compelling cast of finely drawn characters acting out an intricate and powerful human drama.

Mary Garrett reads and writes in Middle Tennessee.

Fiction, Literary Fiction, Short Stories

Fiction Short Stories Literary Fiction

If I Survive You

Review by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

The flame that burns brightly on the colorful cover of Jonathan Escoffery’s debut is an appropriate image, because If I Survive You is a blazing success. With a profoundly authentic vision of family dynamics and racism in America, this collection of connected stories explores the young adulthood of a character named Trelawny, whose parents fled political violence in Jamaica only to face hard luck in Miami.

These eight stories (all except one were previously published) are completely immersive, humorous yet heartbreaking. The first, “In Flux,” sets the stage well, describing Trelawny’s 1980s childhood and his tortured, complex search for clarity about his identity. The questions are invasive: “What are you?” people ask him, and he turns to his mother, wondering, “Are we Black?” His confusion at school is loaded with cynical truths, such as his take on his fifth grade lessons about the history of slavery in the United States: “It’s: Mostly good people made a big mistake. It’s: That was a long, long time ago. It’s: Honest Abe and Harriet Tubman and M.L.K fixed all that nasty business. It’s: Now we don’t see race.“

Sixth grade brings disaster: “A hurricane named Andrew pops your house’s roof open, peeling it back like the lid of a Campbell’s soup can, pouring a fraction of the Atlantic into your bedroom, living room—everywhere—bloating carpet, drywall, and fiberboard with sopping sea salt corrosion.” After the hurricane, Trelawny’s family rips apart, with his older brother and father moving out together. This parting is further explored in “Under the Ackee Tree,” a story told from the perspective of Trelawny’s father that was previously published in The Paris Review and included in The Best American Magazine Writing 2020. Trelawny’s brother, Delano, who longs to be a musician, shines in his own story set on the eve of Hurricane Irene, titled “If He Suspected He’d Get Someone Killed This Morning, Delano Would Never Leave His Couch.”

Hoping to be a writer, Trelawny goes to college in the frigid Midwest, only to find himself back in Miami amid the Great Recession, living out of his SUV and scrambling for work. As Trelawny notes, he “had faithfully followed the upward mobility playbook, only to wind up an extraordinary failure.” This quest is at the center of a trio of riveting, memorable and surprising stories: “Odd Jobs,” “Independent Living” and the exquisite titular tale.

Escoffery brings an imaginative, fresh voice to his deep exploration of what it means to be a man, son, brother, father and nonwhite immigrant in America. As Trelawny notes, “If I don’t create characters who look like me, who will? Visibility is important. Otherwise, it’s as if we don’t exist.”

Jonathan Escoffery brings an imaginative, fresh voice to his deep exploration of what it means to be a man, son, brother, father and nonwhite immigrant in America. As his protagonist notes, "If I don't create characters who look like me, who will? Visibility is important. Otherwise, it's as if we don't exist."

Fiction, World Fiction

Fiction World Fiction

Diary of a reluctant scam artist

Review by bookpagedev

by Lauren Bufferd

Recent years have brought exciting new novels from Nigerian-born novelists like Helen Oyeyemi, Chris Abani and, of course, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The latest addition to that list is Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, whose strikingly accomplished new novel I Do Not Come to You by Chance takes the reader straight into the world of Nigerian 419s–the scams that begin with an email designed to deplete the savings accounts of a gullible recipient.

I Do Not Come to You by Chance tells the story of Kingsley Ibe, fresh out of college with an engineering degree but unable to find a job. He tries to do everything the honest way (and the way his parents expect him to), but without a long leg, the Nigerian term for someone who knows someone who can help, he remains unemployed. This is a big problem for an opara, or elder son, who is responsible for the well-being of the family. After his father’s health takes a downward turn and his sweetheart, Ola, leaves him for a wealthier suitor, Kinsgley turns for a loan to his uncle Boniface, also known as Cash Daddy, who runs a successful empire of 419s. As the family situation grows more dire, Cash Daddy’s offers get sweeter, and before you know it, Kingsley is the #2 man, assisting Cash Daddy with large-scale scams and raking in the money.

Education may be the language of success in Nigeria, Nwaubani suggests, but it is money that does the talking. Kingsley suffers from initial attacks of conscience but soon he is delighted in the utter confidence and pleasure money brings. He wheels and deals and supports his brothers and sister in a style to which they all too soon grow accustomed. But accepting Cash Daddy’s charity does have consequences–eventual parental disapproval, combined with Kingsley’s loneliness, makes him question his difficult choices all over again.

Nwaubani sets Kingsley’s trip down the slippery slope of corruption against the backdrop of daily life in small-town Nigeria. She never shies away from the illegality of the scams, but she is tuned in to the subtle ways that people justify their involvement in criminal activity, especially when they feel that following the rules has gotten them nowhere. It is the ultimate irony that the globalization that has made the 419 scams so successful has also opened the doors to this remarkable piece of fiction.

Fiction, Short Stories

Fiction Short Stories

Natural History

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

For 25 years, beginning with her National Book Award-winning story collection, Ship Fever, Andrea Barrett has devoted vast amounts of her creative energy to vividly imagining several generations of a family and their friends living in central New York. In Natural History, the publisher tells us, Barrett “completes and connects the lives of the family of scientists, teachers and innovators she has been weaving throughout her books.”

First, let’s hope that this isn’t truly our final opportunity to spend time with Barrett’s characters. Long may they prosper! Many of them are female naturalists leading deeply compelling lives in provincial places, corresponding fruitfully with each other and with renowned scientists. They’re not simply unmarried teachers or traveling lecturers concerned with the science lab and the beauty of nature. They’re also devoted family members, lonely visionaries and rivals for the attention and approval of others. Their relationships, professional and emotional, are the understory to the science that seems to so fascinate Barrett.

Second, you need not have read earlier stories to be informed and dazzled by Natural History. (I have read less than half of Barrett’s books and still found myself astounded.) While the larger narrative of Barrett’s collected works has not emerged chronologically but instead episodically, this collection of six stories does contain a basic chronology, following schoolteacher and citizen-scientist Henrietta Atkins (born in 1852) into the early 20th century. A helpful family tree at the end of the book illustrates the range and complexity of family relations as well as the ties “beyond blood or marriage” that link characters.

Third, Barrett is sometimes described as a historical fiction writer. There’s truth in that. Many of these stories are set in the 19th century and offer rich sensory glimpses of small-town American life of that era. At the same time, Barrett has a more modern view of the winnowing processes of history. In one of the collection’s best stories, “The Regimental History,” Henrietta is a bright child serving in the home of a prominent local family, and she reads horrific and confusing first-person accounts of Civil War battles from two brothers in the family. Later, an older Henrietta, now a teacher, helps one brother attempt to clarify and defend his unit’s sullied reputation by contributing to the regimental history. And later still, an even older Henrietta visits a historian who possesses all the soldiers’ testimonials and will now refine and generalize and make everything clear.

Or maybe not. In Natural History, Barrett demonstrates that while history organizes and distills events, fiction brings messy humanity gloriously to life.

Andrea Barrett has devoted vast amounts of her creative energy to vividly imagining generations of a family and their friends living in central New York, but you need not have read her earlier stories to be informed and dazzled by Natural History.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Turbulent, sweeping saga

Review by bookpagedev

by Robert Fleming

he early work of novelist Jeff Shaara was inevitably compared to that of his father, Michael Shaara, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel The Killer Angels. With his first two novels, Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure, Jeff Shaara completed the Civil War trilogy his father had begun. The younger Shaara went on to write a best-selling novel of the Mexican-American War (Gone for Soldiers) and in his latest work, he shifts his focus to the American Revolution.

Shaara says his new book is the first of a two-part saga exploring the full sweep of the conflict that gave birth to this republic and routed the British after a brief but bloody war. Again choosing to go inside the minds of the principal players, he selects four of the most powerful personalities of the era: John Adams, Ben Franklin, George Washington and General Thomas Gage, the commander-in-chief of British forces.

Opening with a brief biography on each of the essential characters, Shaara leads us through the fast-moving American uprising that first protested, then sought to overthrow English colonial rule. Shaara uses the characters of Adams, Gage and Franklin to create a behind-the-scenes feel for the maneuvers on both sides.

The book succeeds in its effort to show how a real revolution is mounted, with men and women of varying personalities struggling to form a new nation under the penalty of reprisal and death. In much historical fiction of this period, the life of British society among the American colonials is shortchanged, but not here. Shaara provides a fascinating glimpse of the British ruling class in all its stiff, autocratic complexity. Some of the book’s finest scenes come when his supporting characters are allowed their time on the page, including such familiar names as Sam Adams, Lord Hillsborough, John Hancock, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, Tom Paine and William Pitt.

Not content with a panoramic view, Shaara also explores how deeply the pressures of revolt cut into the social fabric of the day, splitting families and severing friendships.

Sweeping and turbulent, Rise to Rebellion rarely fails to satisfy the reader who appreciates historical fiction done with style, accuracy, sensitivity and analytical skill. If there were questions about whether Shaara would live up to his literary pedigree, this should be the book to finally silence the doubters.