A Review of Kate Quinn’s “The Huntress”
When the Hunter Becomes the Hunted
Sometimes, all a novel is is just fun. That’s the case of the sprawling World War II-era tale The Huntress, which takes 560 pages to unspool its story. The Huntress is big, sopping Fun with a capital F. That’s it, that’s all. There’s nothing more to it than that. It is not well written in the literary tradition sense — in case, in many areas, it’s a poorly written book. It is not going to win any major writing awards probably. All it is is an adventure tale that will have you turning pages compulsively, without being able to easily put it down. So, if you’re looking for a book that has sex scenes that won’t leave you guffawing at how awkwardly written they are, this book is not for you. If you want fun, though, this book is just that.
There are enough storylines in this novel to fill three books, since it does center around three very different characters telling their tale at three different points of the Second World War and its aftermath. First, we have a young photography nut living in Boston in 1946 named Jordan, who immediately starts to question who or what her new stepmother is or at least was during the war, after having more clues than you can shake a stick at being dropped that this stepmother has, at the very least, Nazi sympathies. Then, there are alternating chapters told about a former English newspaper journalist and his Russian wife in 1950s Vienna who are aiming to take down a woman who was a Nazi (Jordan’s stepmother?) that murdered children during the war. Thirdly, yet another series of alternating chapters (needlessly) relates the story of that Russian wife’s involvement in the Russian war effort, leading up to an encounter with the female Nazi (also during the war) that leaves her alive and shaken, and hungry for vengeance.
While this is a very entertaining and enjoyable book — cloying sex scenes and all — it probably doesn’t need to be 560 pages long. You could easily halve the book because — and this is a bit of a spoiler — the bits about the Nazi hunters (that husband and wife team) basically come really close to figuring out what’s going on with the flimsiest of leads. Then they drop the ball on their investigation for the last half of the book as they fight and figure out their feelings for one another, while their partner-in-crime Tony makes googly eyes at Jordan after the trio makes their way to Boston and circle endlessly around their prey. This is a book that goes on and on. Does it ratchet up the tension because of this trait? Yes, I suppose it does. However, did we really need to know that the ex-journalist’s wife had a lengthy and protracted romance with another woman she was flying with during the war as an aviator and bomber as told in its own unique section of the book? I’m not so sure, though — let me say it — I welcome the inclusion of any LGBTQ character(s) into a work of historical fiction where you may least expect them.
There’s a note about the historical accuracy of the novel at the very back, written by author Kate Quinn, that seems to indicate that this is a World War II book with a difference — it shines a light on some underexposed areas of the war, such as the fact that the Russians had dedicated female-only air force divisions and that the appetite for Nazi hunting was fairly low after the war as people looked to the Russians as new threats and simultaneously wanted to close a harrowing chapter of human history. So you’ll learn some stuff about history in reading this thriller, which is always a nice plus when you come to a work of fiction — this work is peppered with enough of the real to make it a fascinating read. What doesn’t work so well? Well, the writing can be, at times, atrocious and amateur-night with non sequiturs that are yuk-inducing, not serious and composed. I don’t know if this was done with the intent to remind readers that they are, after all, reading a work of fiction or say anything about the skill or lack thereof that the author has in her writing arsenal. I’m sort of surprised — since this is a book coming out with a major publisher — that it wasn’t more tightly edited because, in particularly the first third of the book, there are so many sentences that jar against the eye and imaginary voice inside your head, that it’s utterly hard to take The Huntress with any semblance of the profound.
In the end, all that can be said about this book is that it is a barrel of fun. There are thrills and chills galore, and you’ll wind up rooting for the good guys as they circle around a very bad Nazi character whose heinous deeds aren’t very well defined — which is a bit of a problem, because we’re told just how bad of a human being she is without really having any sort of justification into why she’s so evil in the first place. You can’t take a book like The Huntress very seriously, because it simply doesn’t take itself very seriously at all. This is just one overly long book that doesn’t need to be as long as it is, that is all about telling a bunch of stories that seemingly don’t have much in the way of connective tissue — at least, not at first — and then pulling these strands together in dramatically obvious ways. Since the ways are so dramatically obvious, that’s where the thrills come from — knowing that you’re reading a story that you’ve probably read somewhere else before. If that sounds like fun to you, you’re going to have a whale of a time with The Huntress. If not, well, there are probably better books about the Second World War that you can probably read. It’s all up to you and your inclinations and whether or not fun is a word in your literary vocabulary. That’s all there is to say, really. The end.
Kate Quinn’s The Huntress will be published by William Morrow on February 26, 2019.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
