Although the book falls short of fulfilling its potential, Hearth delivers a mildly amusing story featuring a wealth of...
Hearth’s cast of quirky small-town Southern misfits returns to tackle new challenges in this sequel to her debut novel (Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women’s Literary Society, 2012).
Literary Society member Eudora “Dora” Welty Witherspoon has been living in Jackson, Missississippi, for several months, researching her family’s history, when she receives a telegram summoning her home to Naples, Florida. Returning posthaste, she learns her ex-husband, Darryl Norwood, is developing a housing estate that threatens to disturb the ecosystem and displace a number of residents, including former stripper-turned-alligator hunter Dolores Simpson. Dora tries to reason with Darryl but fails to make headway, so her old book club friends rush to her aid. Transplanted Bostonian Jackie Hart, known among Neapolitans as Miss Dreamsville, is outraged that Darryl has usurped her moniker and dubbed the development Dreamsville Estates. She airs her displeasure in a column for the local newspaper and reminds citizens that the ghost of a Native American who was killed by European settlers allegedly haunts the disputed land. Jackie’s editorial wins over some readers, but her words don’t stop Darryl. Amid moments of soul-searching and surprising revelations, the friends coordinate an alternate plan to save the property. As they take action, Dora contemplates information she uncovers about her family; Dolores reflects upon past decisions and longs for the return of her son, who’s living in New York City; and, acutely aware that they’re defying convention, two more book club members care for another’s infant while she attends college in a distant city. Hearth’s sound writing and wit create a pleasant diversion despite superficial attempts to introduce subject matter relevant to Southern society in the '60s and beyond. Her inclusion of topics ranging from racial injustice and single parenthood to economic development vs. environmental protection might have enriched the narrative and propelled it to the next level, but, sadly, these themes are never wholly integrated into the plot.
Although the book falls short of fulfilling its potential, Hearth delivers a mildly amusing story featuring a wealth of eccentric characters.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6574-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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