The Old Lion

December 1, 2022

In award-winning debuter Bell's The Disenchantment, unhappily married Baroness Marie Catherine and self-confident Mademoiselle de Conti become lovers in a 17th-century Paris beset by scheming nobility and servants immured in witchcraft (35,000-copy first printing). In The Secret Book of Flora Lea, from New York Times best-selling, Christy Award-winning Henry, Hazel unwraps a package at the rare bookstore where she works to discover a book telling the story she made up for her little sister, who vanished after they were evacuated from World War II London two decades previously. Jackson follows up award-winning nonfiction with To Die Beautiful, based on the life of World War II Dutch Resistance fighter Hannie Schaft, who also figures in Noelle Salazar's recent Angels of the Resistance (50,000-copy first printing). In Morton's latest, Jess has an uncomfortable Homecoming when she returns from London to Australia after the grandmother who raised her is hospitalized; she learns that her family is linked to a horrific unsolved 1959 crime (250,000-copy first printing).New York Times best-selling author Noble tells the story of The Tiffany Girls, who did much of the design and construction of Tiffany's glorious glassworks without credit (75,000-copy first printing). Paul's Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? features Elise St. John, a young Black woman who is startled that she and her sisters have inherited the multimillion-dollar estate of star Kitty Karr Tate; then she learns that Kitty was actually her grandmother, passing for white (100,000-copy first printing). After the celebratedAriadne and Elektra, Saint brings us Atalanta, the story of a masterly huntress who was the only woman to sail with the Argonauts (125,000-copy first printing). A four-time winner of the American Library Association's William Boyd Young Award (for excellence in military fiction), New York Times best-selling author Shaara limns the life of Theodore Roosevelt in The Old Lion (100,000-copy first printing). Working at the Jeu de Paume during World War II after having fled Germany, Sophie executes a Paris Deception in Turnbull's latest; she rescues modernist paintings looted from Jewish families and set for destruction by smuggling them out of the museum and replacing them with forgeries created by her sister-in-law (75,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing). Famed novelist/historian Weir follows up her "Six Tudor Queens" series by reimagining Henry VIII in The King's Pleasure.

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March 15, 2023
Historical novelist Shaara explores the enormously consequential life of Theodore Roosevelt through the man's own point of view. Solid biographies of Roosevelt already exist, of course, but fiction is the only vehicle for suggesting what his thoughts might have been. This novel races through his career, seemingly trying not to miss a single adventure, battle, or victory, even if only in passing. TR writes the well-received The Naval War of 1812 and later becomes assistant secretary of the Navy. No, wait--he's governor of New York, fighting corruption. But that was yesterday, and today he's leading his men up San Juan Hill. Next to him, a fellow Rough Rider says "There's not a Spanish bullet made that can kill me" just before being shot in the mouth. In a flash, it would seem, Roosevelt is the Republican candidate for vice president. Pages later, President McKinley is shot and lingers near death. Suddenly TR realizes, "Good Godfrey. I'll be the president of the United States." Contemporary writer and biographer Hermann Hagedorn interviews him from time to time and asks questions about his battles and accomplishments that might not otherwise fit in with the storyline. Oh yes, I did help settle the coal strike...but don't ask me about that damn Medal of Honor. And the Panama Canal triumph must be squeezed in somehow. The author deeply admires his subject, as many people do. But Shaara's tone occasionally drifts toward hagiography. Deep in the Brazilian jungle, near the river still called Rio Roosevelt, TR and his son Kermit suffer "open sores and boils" as they accompany a scientific expedition, and the locals love him for it: "Roosevelt's illness and agony could not sway their beliefs that here, before them, stood a king." One novel cannot completely deal with all that Roosevelt packed into the six decades of life he predicts for himself. "I know you, Teddy," says his wife, Edith. "You have mountains to climb, and no one can stop you." Indeed, nothing stops him but his heart. A glowing tribute to a Rushmore-worthy president. The Old Lion himself would have called it "dee-lightful!"

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March 6, 2023
Shaara (The Eagle’s Claw) delivers a ponderous narrative of Theodore Roosevelt. In December 1918, a 60-year-old Roosevelt is near the end of his life, and with his decline exacerbated by news that his son Quentin perished in WWI, he agrees to a final set of interviews with his biographer, Hermann Hagedorn. Shaara then flashes back to 1868 New York City, as the nine-year-old “Teedie” struggles with asthma. His father implores him to toughen up, and he goes on to become an accomplished boxer, Harvard graduate magna cum laude, author of an acclaimed book on the War of 1812, New York City police commissioner, Spanish-American war hero, and politician. He deals with personal tragedies along the way, most notably the deaths on the same day in 1884 of his mother and his first wife, the former by a severe case of typhoid fever and the latter of complications after delivering their child, causing Roosevelt to feel as if his life has become a “cruel nightmare.” Shaara occasionally returns to the bedside dialogues with Hagedorn, but these scenes often feel as strained as his stricken subject, whose responses to the biographer’s questions are prefaced by stock reactions like “ill-disguised annoyance” and “a long, painful breath.” Despite the richness of the source material, this is a bit of a slog.

April 15, 2023
Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president of the U.S., led a much-documented robust and eventful life. Most readers know the bullet points--San Juan Hill, the Square Deal, the Nobel Prize--and, of course, he has been the subject of numerous award-winning biographies, including David McCullough's Mornings on Horseback, Edmund Morris' The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, and Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Bully Pulpit. Now historical-fiction master Shaara, the author of Gods and Generals and The Eagle's Claw (among many others), offers a fictional take on TR, taking us inside the mind of the man and speculating on his motivations, uncertainties, and frailties. The novel is structured around a late-in-life interview Roosevelt did with his biographer Hermann Hagedorn; but once TR starts talking, it follows a mostly chronological order, with plenty of asides, allowing Shaara to show the aging former president reflecting on his life. It's a colorful portrait of a colorful man, and as Shaara has done with his Civil War and WWII novels, he achieves both a vividly realized landscape and a full-bodied portrait of his subject.

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