Artsy ruminations aside, an entertaining, psychologically rich story of a sometimes giddy, sometimes painful awakening.
A frustrated wife tries to get her groove back with the help of a sexy photographer and inspiration from the artist Georgia O’Keeffe in this debut novel.
At the age of 34, with two preschool kids, Elizabeth Crawford finds herself going crazy in a passionless marriage to her husband, Ben, whose lack of desire for her leaves her feeling “unloved and unbeautiful.” She’s also hit a roadblock in her Ph.D. dissertation on 20th-century painter O’Keeffe, struggling to figure out how a sojourn in Hawaii provoked the artist to switch from creating lush flowers to producing pictures of cow skulls in the desert. Assistance on both problems materializes in the form of Richard Ferris, a handsome photographer who turns his smoldering gaze on Elizabeth in their tai chi class. Richard is fascinated by her O’Keeffe theories and proposes a daring way for her to connect more deeply with the painter’s psyche: pose nude for him to re-create a famous series of photographs taken of the artist in the 1920s by her lover, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. During the photo sessions, Elizabeth progresses from severe bashfulness at loosening a few buttons to ebullience as more clothing comes off. She feels “her skin tingling, alert and alive,” while the heightening sexual tension with Richard renders her “dizzy, weak with the desire that flooded her body.” Her walk on the wild side leads to more exposure than she bargained for and eventually forces her to reconsider her attitudes toward Richard, her marriage, O’Keeffe, and herself. The art history musings in Probst’s yearning tale of renewal—“Her core’s still there, her female essence, but it isn’t accessible, not like it is in the flower paintings she did earlier”—often feel murky and uninvolving. Fortunately, the author paints a vivid and absorbing portrait of domestic life—she’s a superb observer of children’s moods and antics—in an unhappy marriage that limps along on deadening routine and sedated feelings. (After a perfunctory coupling with Ben, Elizabeth “knew they’d had sex the same way she knew that the rent was due or that she needed to move a load of laundry from the washer to the dryer.”) Readers will root for Elizabeth—and wince in amusement at her pratfalls—as she strikes out in improbable new directions.
Artsy ruminations aside, an entertaining, psychologically rich story of a sometimes giddy, sometimes painful awakening.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-890-3
Page Count: 330
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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