An absorbing tale with plenty of soap-opera conflicts and a fiercely independent, complex lead.
A debut historical novel, based loosely on a true story, offers a drama set in the Deep South, where passing for white brings riches and heartache.
In 1871, Felice Gallagher is born in a shanty on Colin Gallagher’s Mississippi cotton plantation, her “color white as a magnolia flower.” Sadly, her black mother dies of malaria after giving birth. Seven years later, yellow fever ravages the plantation. The aunt and uncle who raised Felice succumb to the fever, as do the parents of her older black half sister, Emerald, and members of the white plantation owner’s family. Colin, who fathered both girls, brings them to live with him in the big house. It is a dream life for Felice. Five years pass, Em has married, and now the floods come. Colin tragically drowns. Thirteen-year-old Felice is sent to a convent school in New Orleans, where she remains for the next seven years. Then the white, handsome Michael Devane walks into her life, seeking a governess for the children of recently widowed Yvonne Herbert, the wife of the Louisiana governor’s cousin. Felice and Michael become lovers, but he is a politically ambitious scoundrel. During a quarrel, Michael discovers a letter from Em that betrays Felice’s biracial heritage. Calling her a “high yellow harlot,” he throws her out of Yvonne’s house in Thibodaux, Louisiana. Bereft, Felice takes a train to New Orleans, where she finds refuge in a brothel. Renamed Felicity, she eventually becomes the madam of her own successful “parlor houses.” Westergren’s addictive, occasionally steamy melodrama is as much a commentary on post–Civil War racism as it is a story about her strong, intricate central character. Felice’s later marriage to a white man would not have been considered legal had authorities known her true heritage at the time. The engaging plot, which features some violence, is generally well paced. While effective, the text is uncomfortably replete with the hateful language of bigotry. In addition, numerous, meticulously detailed descriptions of décor and fashion intermittently slow down the action.
An absorbing tale with plenty of soap-opera conflicts and a fiercely independent, complex lead.Pub Date: June 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79604-320-4
Page Count: 474
Publisher: XlibrisUS
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2020
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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