Admirably crisp prose within a disappointingly slight study of race and family.
In this debut novel, long-listed for the Orange Prize, a black family struggles to hold itself together in the South Dakota Badlands of 1917, tested by drought, racism and suspicion.
The story opens with a striking scene that shows just how difficult the DuPrees have it: A two-month drought has forced Rachel, the family matriarch and novel’s narrator, to send her six-year-old daughter down a well to gather enough water for the family. Rachel has been living on this arid farm for the past 14 years, moving from Chicago to follow her husband, Isaac, an Army veteran who took advantage of the Homestead Act to acquire and expand their property. Together they had seven children, five of which have survived the tough landscape, and Rachel is close to delivering another as the story begins. That tension set, Weisgarber shuttles the narrative back and forth in time, capturing Rachel’s earlier life working in a boardinghouse for the black laborers at the Chicago stockyards. The owner of the boardinghouse, Rachel’s future mother-in-law, is a no-nonsense promoter of black uplift (Ida B. Wells makes a cameo appearance), and deep-seated racial prejudices are a consistent theme, from the brutal race riots Rachel reads about in letters from home to the contempt Isaac has for the Native Americans he fought while in the Army. Still, most of the difficulties Rachel faces are of the domestic variety, such as keeping her children fed and healing a sick milk cow. Weisgarber’s style is Alice Walker by way of Kent Haruf. She writes tenderly and with a tinge of spirituality when it comes to intimate family moments, and her spare descriptions evoke the simple territory in which the novel is set. That makes for clear storytelling, but overall the story feels curiously thin. The key plot complications—a threat to Rachel’s unborn child and a revelation about a past relationship of Isaac’s—arrive and fade with only modest drama. The muted tone is intended to be a testament to Rachel’s indomitability, but it makes her narrator as little different psychologically at story’s end as she was at the beginning.
Admirably crisp prose within a disappointingly slight study of race and family.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02201-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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