A brilliant debut.
Short story writer Taylor's first novel is a hillbilly noir employing literary language to explore the dark corners of human frailty.
Taylor sets his story in present-day western Kentucky, among coal-raped hills and "a dingy worn trouble of hollers" near the Gasping River, its waters "a worn keep of verses that even now were being writ with the ceaseless churn of the waters." Beam Sheetmire, "nineteen, full of bull piss with his own portion of meanness lurking in him," accidentally kills a man attempting to rob him while Beam was operating his father Clem's river ferry. Clem urges Beam to run, but Beam soon learns he’s running not from justice but from Loat Duncan, "a man others respected and feared," thief, gambler, pimp and killer. Taylor’s novel is a tangled, macabre morality tale, with Beam learning hard lessons exemplified by Pete, an old ginseng hunter, who tells him, "[y]ou’re in some bad country and it’s full of bad men." The plot speeds along, introducing minor players like a trucker in a three-piece suit, with eyes "no different than the clean blank eyes of a marble cherubim," and Daryl, "a double amputee and pusher of whores and prime stroke grass." Loat’s relentless pursuit isn’t about revenge. In fact, Beam is Loat’s biological son. Beam’s mother, Derna, once Loat’s mistress and then his prostitute, left him for "Clem...the mere jackscrabble of denim and hearsay, a rumor of a man who had loved a woman with all the sad implacable wrong of his heart." Taylor’s understanding of place, "ancient beyond all measure and remote beyond all reckoning," and the hard people who "walk around with the dark all their lives until they are the dark" echoes the cultural dissections of Daniel Woodrell and James Lee Burke.
Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-935439-99-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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