The profusion of narrative threads and historical detail doesn’t quite add up to a well-told story.
A novel about family, communication, and colonialism in a rarely discussed sphere of World War II conflict.
On March 13, 1942, the Durants—Claire, an aspiring anthropologist, and Shep, a British civil surgeon—rush to prepare their exit from Port Blair, a British penal colony on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, now under threat from Japanese forces. Claire and Shep pack up her field journals, arrowheads, and shell bowls collected from the native Biya and his medically useful plant specimens from their expeditions into the forest over the past five years. But the one thing they can’t locate is their 4-year-old son, Ty. Mute since birth, Ty’s strongest bond is with his Indian caretaker, Naila, a 13-year-old girl who understands his silent capriciousness better than his own mother. Shep, desperate to get his wife to stay on the ship to Calcutta and safety, drugs her and stays behind on the island to look for their son. He finds Ty almost immediately—he and Naila were napping in a banyan grove—but the family’s separation decisively changes the course of each of its members’ lives. As one of the few remaining British officials on the island, Shep is locked up by Japanese troops, but not before he sends Ty off into the forest with Naila and Leyo, a Biya family friend, to hide with the tribe. Claire, meanwhile, joins the war effort as a codebreaker, devising a code based on the Biya language for a mission that might just allow her to reunite her family. The plot is rollicking in précis but much less gripping in execution, bogged down by an unmanageable amount of detail, the result of Liu’s (editor: Restoring Our Bodies, Reclaiming Our Lives, 2011, etc.) obviously meticulous research: “Claire gets to work making her final tests of the TBX-8 transceiver pack, which will be her primary responsibility, and the SCR-536 mobile Handie-talkie that Ward will use for voice communication back to the TBX.” At every turn, it seems, there’s another islander or British government employee whose backstory is meant to lend emotional heft to the novel. The result is a book that feels scattershot—even the most theoretically wrenching moments don’t quite land, and the reader comes away oddly unmoved by the entire cast.
The profusion of narrative threads and historical detail doesn’t quite add up to a well-told story.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59709-889-2
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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