Although Ballou’s odds don’t feel insurmountable in this uneven tale, readers will likely applaud her determination as she...
A historical novel based on the real life of a 19th-century spiritualist feminist.
Allan (Addie, 2011) has spent the last few years researching and writing about the life of Addie Ballou, a poet in the late 1800s. More than anything, she says, her scholarship has led her to conclude that “the personal stories of women [have] been left untold and at a minimum misunderstood....[U]nspeakable secrets went with them to their graves.” Readers first meet Addie as she returns home from supporting the Union during the Civil War as a battlefield nurse while her husband was off fighting as a soldier. When she arrives, she finds that he disrespects her and is cruel to their children and that his family despises her. She becomes determined to live as independently as possible within the confines of her situation. Fully entrenched in the spiritualist movement, she gains some agency by lecturing across the Midwest and writing poetry for spiritualist publications, but it’s not enough: She’s not allowed any claim to her earnings, and her husband still rules the roost at home. Eventually, she takes her infant daughter and leaves her husband and her young sons, setting out on a path of spiritualism, suffrage and sovereignty. The path isn’t easy, though, as there are some marital reconciliations and legal obstacles Addie must navigate in order to finally get a divorce. Allan’s dedication to highlighting the life of an early proponent of women’s rights is admirable. Spiritualist researchers will be grateful for Allan’s thoroughly researched work (inspired, she says, by Addie’s original diaries). Newcomers to the subject matter may also find Addie’s journey interesting, if not inspirational. Overall, it’s not an especially exciting story: A pattern develops of Addie traveling somewhere to lecture, staying at someone’s house, getting advice from them and then traveling again. As a result, the scenes end up blurring together. The prose is a bit inconsistent; it’s either overwritten (“Addie suddenly saw clarity in the woman’s heretofore rambling collection of data expressed in her dialogue”) or too sparse (“There. It was said. The accusation made”). The terms of spiritualism also aren’t clearly defined, despite a brief introduction before the novel begins.
Although Ballou’s odds don’t feel insurmountable in this uneven tale, readers will likely applaud her determination as she undertakes her journey to freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499575538
Page Count: 318
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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