You’ll leave this book fulfilled in knowledge of its main subject, yet still yearning to know more.
Time and space are willfully shifted around in this historical fiction inspired by the life of a Nigerian-born man who, after having been enslaved, became a clergyman, linguist, and abolitionist in the 19th century.
Samuel Àjàyí Crowther (ca. 1809-1891) set an astonishingly triumphant example for his fellow West Africans in his rich, accomplished lifetime. After he was freed from Portuguese slavers by Britain’s Royal Navy and left in Sierra Leone, he added the first and last names to the one he’d had from birth, studied languages, and was eventually ordained an Anglican minister. He translated the Bible and other church texts into Yoruba, became the first African bishop of the Anglican Church, and campaigned against the slave trade throughout his life. This posthumously published novel by Bándélé (1967-2022), who was also a celebrated playwright and filmmaker in his native Nigeria, presents an impressionistic, mostly nonlinear narrative of this extraordinary life, beginning with Àjàyí’s childhood in his hometown of Óṣogún just before it is laid siege by the “Malian swordmen” who sold its thousands of residents into slavery. He tells his mother of a premonition he had of a god of “health and well-being” looking malarial, a sign of troubles ahead. Bándélé imposes his own imaginative resources on this and subsequent events of Crowther’s life. Only occasionally do Bándélé’s imaginative projections lead him to an anachronism—“We have heard of white men who turned the ocean into a highway,” Ájàyí’s mother tells him early on—but not often enough to obstruct the novel’s rich stew of historical perspective, storytelling brio, and humane insight. He shows as much acumen in staging conversations between the older, much-traveled Crowther and the people of his erstwhile homeland as he does in rendering a real-life meeting Crowther had with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, whom he holds spellbound when he recites the Lord’s Prayer in Yoruba. The novel’s collagelike approach to Crowther’s story not only gives a rich sense of the dimensions of his achievement, but also offers a keener, broader perspective as to the nature of African slavery and those who were complicit in its execution, making Bándélé as effective a historian as he was a dramatist.
You’ll leave this book fulfilled in knowledge of its main subject, yet still yearning to know more.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780063417083
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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
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