Encompassing the lives of women in the 20th century, this sprawling saga is tender and satisfying, with a heartbreaking end.
A single tragic event shapes four generations of American women in this accomplished and poignant debut.
It is 1927 and since their mother’s death, Mabel and Bertie rely on each other in the face of their stepfather’s abuse. Young Bertie tries to avoid his drunken rage, but Mabel maintains the peace for the price of her soul—Jim calls her little wife, rapes her regularly and, for her 16th birthday, takes her to the city to pose for pornography. When Mabel notices Jim’s eye wander to Bertie, she knows she must act. With the help of Bertie’s sweetheart Wallace, he and Mabel concoct a scheme to release the sisters from their stepfather’s tyranny. After her graduation ceremony, Bertie comes home to find Jim Butcher hung and a note implying that Mabel and Wallace have run away together. Bertie, however, never got the letter intended for her, or the enclosed train ticket to take her to her sister and beau. Crushed by the perceived betrayal, Bertie leaves town and marries Hans, finding security if not love. They make it through the Depression and have Alma and then Rainey, but nothing can ease Bertie’s hardness, and the letters Mabel sends go unopened. Mabel ends up in Chicago, becoming a photographer, and adopts a little girl named Daisy (actually she steals her away), whose father is molesting her. Mabel never gives up hope of finding her beloved sister, and this perhaps saves her and Daisy from the kind of aching unhappiness that infects Bertie and her daughters. Alma marries a wealthy, unkind doctor and has a son who grows up to be just like dad, while devoting her life to becoming the perfect hostess. Rainey has the bad luck of getting pregnant by Carl, a closeted homosexual. Her daughters Lynn (who never gets over being separated from her father) and Grace, who crafts body armor after her Vietnam vet husband dies, continues the legacy of discord born of an undelivered letter.
Encompassing the lives of women in the 20th century, this sprawling saga is tender and satisfying, with a heartbreaking end.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-54270-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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