A vivid and dynamic coming-of-age story framed by the struggle for civil rights.
In the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, an African American girl in the 1950s Midwest finds her life complicated by the repercussions of desegregation and the new pride of the civil rights movement.
In this historical novel, 8-year-old Lauren Sullivan is not enthusiastic about being one of the first Black children to enter the formerly all-White Garfield Elementary School in Kansas City. But, as her mother explains, new integration laws leave her no choice. Still, the laws cannot force changes in attitudes, and Lauren faces uncomfortable challenges in her new school, from the outright rejection of her White classmates to the less-than-benign indifference of her teacher, who seems content to let her bright new student simply disappear. In Lauren’s supportive home, where she lives with her mother, Helen; her gentle brother, Danny; and her grandparents Ezra and Clarice, she also confronts the contradictions of living in a racist society. Ezra’s distrust of White people is grounded in the long-ago lynching death of his brother. In addition, Ezra claims that Clarice responds to racial prejudice by “out-whiting the white folks.” Helen left Lauren’s father, Lawrence, years before. He was drained by depression and apathy stemming from the lack of opportunity for Black Americans. With an innate determination to learn and succeed and the strength and love of her remaining family, Lauren negotiates the hurdles of her adolescence and young adulthood. Some of these problems are driven by racism; others, such as sexual assault and domestic violence, by sexism. But over and over, Lauren refuses to allow these forces to defeat her as she develops into a confident young woman, going places her elders hardly dared imagine. Robinson’s poignant prologue does an effective job of evoking the “fog of ambiguity and contradiction” that characterize the mid-20th-century America into which Lauren is born. Lauren’s story is captivating, moving, and instructive without being didactic, depicting both the subtleties and the overtness of racism through the eyes of one of its most innocent victims, an observant child. An overly abrupt, unsatisfying ending, strangely focused on romantic love, mars an otherwise carefully drawn portrait of African American resilience.
A vivid and dynamic coming-of-age story framed by the struggle for civil rights.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 289
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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