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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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