A well-crafted, suspenseful novel that highlights difficult historical themes.
Vicars presents a family saga that focuses on cycles of violence from the Civil War era to the present day.
Philip Richards is at the Hilltop bar in Culmine, Texas, contemplating getting the dinner special, when he’s confronted by a woman named Carmen, whom he struggles to recall. She brings up a recent encounter between them and asks him about a mysterious “Valentine’s night promise.” It turns out that he frequently has blackouts while drunk and has stretches of lost time in his past. After his ill father dies, 35-year-old Philip finally faces the family that he’s avoided since he left home at age 15; it’s revealed that his grandfather had sexually abused his sister, Dinah, and that the family refused to acknowledge it. In his father’s home, he finds a manuscript—which may or may not be fiction—written by his father’s great uncle, Sabine Richards; the story involves Philip’s great-great grandfather Russell and an enslaved woman named Feevah. Philip and his new lover, Edith, plan to read the text and contemplate the long history of racism, sexual assault, and violence in his family; she believes that Sabine, too, “longs to understand his own family history.” Soon afterward, Philip gets into a fight with a stranger whom he thinks is sexually assaulting Carmen; after the police arrive, however, the stranger and Carmen falsely accuse Philip of rape and assault. In this emotionally resonant novel, Vicars expertly weaves together past and present events to construct a portrait of a troubled family. The narrative combines elements of mysteries and historical fiction, while also developing realistic relationships that feel authentic. The transitions between the past and present accounts are sometimes abrupt, but it offers readers welcome respites while never abandoning the essential plot. Readers may question the role of characters who are portrayed as seducers and manipulators; however, the novel as a whole expertly portrays the effects of assault and violence.
A well-crafted, suspenseful novel that highlights difficult historical themes.Pub Date: July 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781917214094
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Bloodhound Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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