A multigenerational exploration of slavery’s legacy and the power of Black joy and Black love.
New fiction from the bestselling author of Caul Baby (2021).
In 2019, Ardelia Gibbs and Oliver Benjamin are celebrating their engagement on the roof of a restaurant in midtown Manhattan. White linen tablecloths. Floral arches. Sliders and macarons. Nineties soul on the sound system. As the celebration is winding down, Oliver taps his glass to get everyone’s attention. He has a gift for his bride-to-be: a letter that has been passed down from generation to generation in his family, a letter written by a woman named Tirzah to a man named Harrison in 1865. After this prologue, the narrative moves back in time to Mississippi in the aftermath of the Civil War, back to the time in which Tirzah sent a letter to her beloved Harrison with no guarantee that he would ever receive it. The couple had been separated and, while the Freedmen’s Bureau gave them a way to find each other again, there was little chance of them reconnecting. In the mythic version of the American story, emancipation is a single glorious moment when enslaved people become free. Jerkins makes it very clear that the truth is not nearly so simple as she explores a growing family tree and more than 100 years of history. The journey Jerkins’ characters take is similar to the story she shares about her own ancestors in her memoir, Wandering in Strange Lands (2020). In this work of fiction, as in her nonfiction, the author underscores the fact that establishing freedom and protecting freedom is very different from being granted freedom. And by beginning her narrative at a contemporary engagement party, Jerkins foregrounds the unifying power of family and community in creating a Black culture that doesn’t just survive, but thrives.
A multigenerational exploration of slavery’s legacy and the power of Black joy and Black love.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780063234086
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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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