In revealing the very human side of racial tension, Kane offers up an engaging and heartfelt tale.
A story of love and racial tension set in Brooklyn as it spans across decades and transforms the lives of Kane’s (Rabbi, Rabbi, 1995) three main characters.
When Joshua Eubanks finds trouble in his predominantly black Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and falls in with the local criminal element, his single mother, Loretta, moves them to the Jewish enclave of Crown Heights. Their new digs are funded by Loretta’s employer, Alfred Sims. His son, Paul, has his own problems: rebelling against his father by devoting himself to the Jewish identity his father long sought to shed. Rachel Weissman is the beautiful daughter of the rabbi who serves as Paul’s religious mentor. Paul is obsessed with Rachel, and Joshua also falls prey to her charms after straightening himself out and getting a job as a janitor in her father’s yeshiva. This could have been a simple love triangle, but Kane is much more ambitious than that; these characters grow up, learn and change over the course of more than three decades. The story is rooted in the personal struggles of each of these characters, but Kane also details the inner workings of the neighborhoods around them, providing important historical context. All three are bullied because of their race, which prevents the narrative from become overly righteous on anyone’s behalf. The author doesn’t ignore the existence of truly evil intent but instead shows how some of the worst tensions and violence sprout from tragic accidents and mishaps. There are no easy scapegoats, and even some of the more stereotypical characters, like a conservative rabbi and militant black professor, are capable of surprise. At times the rising action snags on some new detail or minor character Kane introduces late in the narrative, but very little here could be considered extraneous.
In revealing the very human side of racial tension, Kane offers up an engaging and heartfelt tale.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1458200754
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Abbott
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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