An engrossing, quietly eloquent, and heartbreaking loss-of-innocence novel.
An evocative historical novel involving the haunting letters and diaries of a World War II flyboy stationed in the South Pacific.
It’s the final August weekend of 1940, and 20-year-old Philip Zumwalt, recently graduated from college, has two goals. He wants to be a famous musician/songwriter, and he dreams of becoming a pilot. For now, he will be moving from his hometown of Nebo, Illinois, to the neighboring town of Payson, where he will be the new high school music teacher. But first there’s a dance to attend at the casino in Quincy’s Highland Park, featuring Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra. He meets the mesmerizing Elinor “El” Robinson, and they dance the night away together. Several days later, Philip begins his teaching assignment. Much to his dismay, he discovers that the woman who so dazzled him at the casino is a senior at Payson-Seymour High School. Worse, she is his student in band and in his class on world problems. The magnetism between them continues, but romance is forbidden until El’s graduation. Swanson uses the world problems class discussions to gently introduce readers to the diverging views roiling the country about whether the United States should or will become involved in the war raging in Europe. After the school year, Philip resigns, and he and El are free to fall in love. Philip enlists in the U.S. Army Air Force, where he hopes to become a pilot. During basic training in Illinois, he acquires the first of his three Army-issued diaries, which are liberally quoted through Part 2 of the novel. This is not an action-driven narrative, although it contains descriptions of several bombing missions that highlight feats of bravery and determination. But these are sandwiched between the long hours Philip spends reading modern classics, drinking to dull his psychological turmoil, struggling to come to terms with the brutality and moral conflicts of war, and writing. Making ample use of cultural and linguistic references of the period—especially through the lyrics and rhythms of popular music—Swanson takes readers inside a painful time capsule.
An engrossing, quietly eloquent, and heartbreaking loss-of-innocence novel.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73728-550-2
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Boathouse Productions
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic, but some will wish for more plot.
This historical fever dream of a novel follows the flight of a servant girl through the Colonial American wilderness, red in tooth and claw.
As in her last novel, Matrix (2021), Groff’s imaginative journey into a distant time and place is powered by a thrumming engine of language and rhythm. “She had chosen to flee, and in so choosing, she had left behind her everything she had, her roof, her home, her country, her language, the only family she had ever known, the child Bess, who had been born into her care when she was herself a small child of four years or so, her innocence, her understanding of who she was, her dreams of who she might one day be if only she could survive this starving time." Those onrushing sentences will follow the girl, “sixteen or seventeen or perhaps eighteen years of age,” through the wilderness surrounding the desperate colony, driven by famine and plague into barbarism, through the territory of “the powhatan and pamunkey” to what she hopes will be “the settlements of frenchmen, canada,” a place she once saw pointed out on a map. The focus is on the terrors of survival, the exigencies of starvation, the challenges of locomotion, the miseries of a body wounded, infected, and pushed beyond its limit. What plot there is centers on learning the reason for her flight and how it will end, but the book must be read primarily for its sentences and the light it shines on the place of humans in the order of the world. Whether she is eating baby birds and stealing the fluff from the mother’s nest to line her boots, having a little tea party with her meager trove of possessions, temporarily living inside a tree trunk that comes with a pantry full of grubs (spiders prove less tasty), or finally coming to rest in a way neither she nor we can foresee, immersion in the girl’s experience provides a virtual vacation from civilization that readers may find deeply satisfying.
The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic, but some will wish for more plot.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9780593418390
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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