Delightful apprentice work by a great American novelist in the making.
An early novel by Dawn Powell (1896-1965) casts a satirical eye on small-town Midwestern life.
The long-running revival of Powell kicked off in 1987, when Gore Vidal championed her work in the New York Review of Books. Since then, there’s been a biography by Tim Page, two volumes of her fiction in the Library of America, and publication of her Diaries and Selected Letters. Yet, as critic Ilana Masad laments, “far more people have heard of Powell’s contemporary wit Dorothy Parker.” Masad contributes the introduction to this reissue of the author’s 1928 novel, her second (although she renounced the first). Like Dance Night (1930) and Come Back to Sorrento (1932), it’s set in Ohio; Powell was born and raised there before moving to New York City, the setting for her best-known work. Sisters Linda and Dorrie Shirley live with their grandmother, called Aunt Jule, in a boardinghouse on the wrong side of the tracks in fictional Birchfield. Beautiful blond Linda, with her “resentful blue eyes,” yearns for respectability and looks down on Jule’s lodgers—“riffraff from the trains,” “fast women and gambling men”—while pining for Courtenay Stall, scion of a good Birchfield family. Younger Dorrie, an aspiring poet, romanticizes their world and the people in it, especially old man Wickley, forever reading aloud from his dust-covered books, “that great voice hurling magnificent words at the walls” of his attic room. There’s not much plot to speak of—will Courtenay ever take notice of Linda?—but the lodging house provides a parade of unsentimental character sketches, including a scandalously flirtatious farm girl married to a much older man, a New York transplant surprised she can’t get lobster salad and chocolate éclairs in Birchfield, and a wheelchair-bound gossip who maliciously follows all the comings and goings.
Delightful apprentice work by a great American novelist in the making.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781953368959
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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