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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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