by Catherine Gentile ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A character-driven story that effectively captures the harrowing violence of the early-20th-century South.
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In Gentile’s historical novel, a Georgia town can’t stop the coming of Jim Crow, or the violence it brings.
Before his death in 1930, Taylor Crawford, who was White, used his money and influence to wield authority in Martonsville that kept it free of racist laws and policies. Numerous Black families live on the property of his Mearswood Island Plantation, and his adopted orphan daughter, Promise Mears Crawford, who’s White, works side by side with the farm’s Black foreman, Fletcher Hart. From Taylor, Fletcher learned history, philosophy, and the psychology of Sigmund Freud, and he looks forward to attending Harvard Medical School to become a doctor. Fletcher’s “mam,” Mother Hart, is a midwife and healer, and delivers babies, cures, and salves in Martonsville to the town’s Black and White citizens. Promise inherits the plantation when Taylor dies, and at first, her only problems are the unexpected discovery of mismanagement of the farm’s finances, and her own looming marriage to a local named Andrew Gills.Yet almost immediately, she faces the serpent that Taylor worked so hard to keep out of his Eden: Daffron Mears, a violent supporter of Jim Crow policies whose family once owned the plantation, which he seeks to reclaim. Over the next three days, Daffron’s actions result in a death, a school burning, and the revelation of some of Martonsville’s secrets, including Promise’s true parentage. Gentile brings 1930s Georgia to life, presenting a humid, sweaty town whose characters are tangled up in local history and have unexpected connections. There are no saints in Martonsville, just flawed human beings, and as such, the characters have depth and nuance. Promise’s determination proves to be an impediment to her relationships but gives her inner strength, and Daffron, a sadistic, evil man, is revealed to be a victim of abuse himself. The book lays bare the cruelty and hypocrisy of Jim Crow throughout the novel, and its greatest strength is in how it sets up mysteries and gut-punch reveals. Readers will sometimes need a moment to catch their breath, even as they keep turning pages.
A character-driven story that effectively captures the harrowing violence of the early-20th-century South.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Booklocker.com, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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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
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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