A page-turning drama about trauma and obsession.
A varied cast of characters is haunted by the lingering shadows of the Spanish Civil War in Averett’s historical novel.
The story opens in 1937 with a letter penned by a young man named Robert informing his parents that he is leaving for Spain with his buddy, Max, whose family “woke up one morning with a Star of David burned into their front yard.” Max, with his keen sense of injustice, feels compelled to go to Spain to fight against Franco; he is killed, leaving Robert on his own. In a moment of courage, Robert fires his rifle, killing a soldier on horseback who is about to murder a young boy. Maria del Carmen Escobar, the young boy’s sister, hides Robert in an old olive oil jar deep in the ground, where he remains for decades. The narrative jumps to 1969, when Michael Virtue, recently graduated from college, is motorcycling in Spain thinking about his uncle Robert, about whom he heard stories when he was a child. After crashing his motorcycle, Michael meets Carmen, who tells him Robert is dead, but she never shows him his grave. Twenty years later, Michael returns to Spain to investigate what happened to Robert. He brings with him the mysterious Delia, who is on the run from the FBI, and he reconnects with Carmen. Averett’s large cast of emotionally complex characters is psychologically tormented by literal and figurative remnants (from old ruins to whispered stories) of the Spanish Civil War. As one character says, “when the body dies, what remains are the stories. They never die.” The author deftly limns each character’s wounds: Michael is obsessed with ferreting out the truth about his uncle; Eugenio, an increasingly deranged military officer, seeks revenge for the murder of a family member; and both Delia and Carmen nurse damaged souls. Via quietly intense and emotionally resonant prose, readers are immersed in a world of psychological distress and mystery.
A page-turning drama about trauma and obsession.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Wellborn Books
Review Posted Online: yesterday
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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