An addictive tale with drama, history, and delightful protagonists.
Jungle critters, diamond smugglers, murder, and three indomitable women propel this early-19th-century historical adventure.
It is 1809, one year after the entire Portuguese Royal Court escaped Napoleon’s army and relocated to Rio de Janeiro. The grand house of a viceroy has been turned into a temporary palace while Prince João, the heir apparent, builds his new royal home outside the city. Behind the palace is a convent that is home to the reigning monarch, Queen Maria I (the “Mad Queen”). Although the court’s arrival has brought new excitement to Rio, it has also resulted in unwelcome changes to the city that is home to Maria Azevedo, a free Black woman, and her younger, adopted sister, Isabel, an Indigenous Guarani. Maria is captain of a mule train that transports crates of gold from the mines in Minas Gerais to a bank in Rio. The team is waiting to register the gold at the Rio Customs office when two members of the Royal Guard harass the group (“They weren’t soldiers, and there was nothing royal about them”). Known as “Bats” because of their long, black, flapping coats, this violent, ad hoc police force was established to “civilize” the locals. The military intervenes, but the sisters’ trouble with the Bats has just begun. Later that evening, the sisters rescue a young woman under attack by a band of hoodlums, thus meeting Victoria Cruz, a Portuguese attendant to the queen. It is the beginning of a formidable friendship that adds extra intrigue to this high-octane escapade/thriller/murder mystery. Barineau’s Rio romp, packed with intriguing and occasionally disturbing historical tidbits, is lightened with a generous dose of humor. The racially and culturally diverse female protagonists are drawn vividly, with the portraits reflecting their unique personalities and abilities. Detail-oriented Maria is fiercely protective and a demon with her whip; spirited, impetuous Isabel, with her ever present assortment of knives secreted under her skirt, relishes a good fight; and the refined, initially timid Victoria turns out to be an expert with a sword. The author captures the sights, smells, sounds, and complicated social structure of Rio while maintaining a steady pace of well-scripted action scenes that, while over-the-top, are thoroughly enjoyable.
An addictive tale with drama, history, and delightful protagonists.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-949935-47-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Orange Blossom Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If it’s possible for America to have a poet laureate, why can’t James McBride be its storyteller-in-chief?
McBride follows up his hit novel Deacon King Kong (2020) with another boisterous hymn to community, mercy, and karmic justice.
It's June 1972, and the Pennsylvania State Police have some questions concerning a skeleton found at the bottom of an old well in the ramshackle Chicken Hill section of Pottstown that’s been marked for redevelopment. But Hurricane Agnes intervenes by washing away the skeleton and all other physical evidence of a series of extraordinary events that began more than 40 years earlier, when Jewish and African American citizens shared lives, hopes, and heartbreak in that same neighborhood. At the literal and figurative heart of these events is Chona Ludlow, the forbearing, compassionate Jewish proprietor of the novel’s eponymous grocery store, whose instinctive kindness and fairness toward the Black families of Chicken Hill exceed even that of her husband, Moshe, who, with Chona’s encouragement, desegregates his theater to allow his Black neighbors to fully enjoy acts like Chick Webb’s swing orchestra. Many local White Christians frown upon the easygoing relationship between Jews and Blacks, especially Doc Roberts, Pottstown’s leading physician, who marches every year in the local Ku Klux Klan parade. The ties binding the Ludlows to their Black neighbors become even stronger over the years, but that bond is tested most stringently and perilously when Chona helps Nate Timblin, a taciturn Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of his community, conceal and protect a young orphan named Dodo who lost his hearing in an explosion. He isn’t at all “feeble-minded,” but the government wants to put him in an institution promising little care and much abuse. The interlocking destinies of these and other characters make for tense, absorbing drama and, at times, warm, humane comedy. McBride’s well-established skill with narrative tactics may sometimes spill toward the melodramatic here. But as in McBride’s previous works, you barely notice such relatively minor contrivances because of the depth of characterizations and the pitch-perfect dialogue of his Black and Jewish characters. It’s possible to draw a clear, straight line from McBride’s breakthrough memoir, The Color of Water (1996), to the themes of this latest work.
If it’s possible for America to have a poet laureate, why can’t James McBride be its storyteller-in-chief?Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422946
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
