Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

  [Translated from Dutch by Vernon Pearce] (Next Chapter, 2025). ISBN: 978-4824156709 In 2021, I was asked to review a novel by an author named Bob Van Laerhoven. Set in South America in a time of revolution and turmoil, Alejandro’s Lie had the kind of depth and dark beauty of story and character that reminded me of Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz , Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind , and Frank Delaney’s Ireland —novels that you don’t just read; instead, you enter them fully and inhabit them, as they inhabit you. After such a memorable, moving experience, I welcomed the chance to review The Long Farewell , especially when I saw that it took place before and during World War II. Although I’ve long been fascinated by the rise of the Nazis, with all that’s happening today (especially in America, where I reside), I’ve been compelled to read book after book about the years 1938 to 1945. As I started The Long Farewell , I’d just finished one book by Erik La...

 (Odyssey Books, 2021). ISBN: ISBN: 978-1922311238 (ebook) The Amber Crane is richly researched historical fiction with complex metaphors and a touch of magical realism. Before you begin, have a look at the cover, which holds a clue: a squadron of World War II planes and, amidst them, a crane carved in a chunk of amber. Once you begin to read, you’ll see that the story primarily takes place in 1644, during The Thirty Years’ War (although no one living and fighting in that time knew how long it would be). The story’s protagonist is Peter, who is training under a master to join the amber guild and become a paternostermaker , so named because they mostly made rosary beads. Like my 22-year-old daughter, Peter has never known life without war, and it has touched him in many ways. His older brother Lorenz—handsome, charming, and popular—who served in Queen Christina of Sweden’s Army, was killed during the war, although it was not combat related. Peter’s mother died of grief at the...

    (New York, Boston, London: Back Bay Books; Little, Brown, 2020). ISBN: 978-0-316-53744-5. As one looks back on the many watershed moments in U.S. history—the result of decisions made by a small group of White men that cost at times millions of lives around the globe—the country’s role in World War II and its aftermath are perhaps the most hotly debated (with Vietnam an equally strong contender) because of the late-war actions of dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Operation Paperclip/the start of the Cold War. America and Russia bringing Nazi scientists—many of whom would not have faired well at Nuremberg—into the fold of the fledging military–industrial complex that Eisenhower and Kennedy tried so hard to forestall set a tone for immoral action on the global stage, the repercussions of which are still being felt. Science, and scientists, are at the heart of Hannah’s War , which is A-list historical fiction centering on a Jewish Austrian scientist named H...