A sharp coming-of-age story that makes history come alive.
In Pugh’s debut novel, a young woman from California joins the Freedom Riders in 1961, gets arrested and jailed in Mississippi, and learns that not everyone appreciates a hero.
Jeri Turner is a 17-year-old spitfire who lives with her cantankerous grandmother in Los Angeles in the early ’60s. As the Civil Rights movement sweeps the country, Jeri volunteers with the Congress of Racial Equality to fight segregation in the South via nonviolent protests. Upon arriving at the bus depot in Jackson, Miss., her group is assaulted, arrested and sent to Parchman Farm, the maximum-security unit of Mississippi’s State Prison. There, through her cell’s air vent, Jeri meets black inmate Ellis Lee. Their brief interactions impel Jeri to skirt big-picture racism and focus on helping Lee—a cause that she is convinced deserves attention, but one that proves disappointingly futile. Pugh’s evocative novel effectively encapsulates the physical and emotional volatility of the Civil Rights era. A former Freedom Rider, the author illustrates the frustration, anger, fear and idealism of youth in her spirited, sharp-tongued protagonist. Pugh writes without sentiment, yet her honest dialogue and insightful descriptions of people and places evoke the visceral sting of injustice. Her ability to create and hold tension is a consistent strength in this novel, and the novel’s tension parallels the tension generated during that era. Pugh also balances the external turbulence with inter-movement politics and personalities. Each character has his or her personal motivations for joining CORE, the validity of which are questioned and judged as much as any criminal’s—black or white. The result is a multilayered story that shows how prejudice and condemnation exist on many levels, across generations, races, genders and states.
A sharp coming-of-age story that makes history come alive.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1936782284
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Langdon Street
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2011
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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