An overlong but often enjoyable historical tale about surviving hardship.
A young Jewish woman in New York City takes a life-changing job in this epistolary novel from Lawler (The Saints of Lost Things, 2014).
Ambitious 22-year-old Miriam Levenson is the Barnard College School of Journalism’s top graduate, but jobs for female reporters are scarce during the Great Depression. Miriam’s family, once prosperous brownstone residents, now occupy a squalid apartment and pawn their belongings to make rent. She eventually takes a position with the Federal Writers’ Project, a program that, among other things, pays writers to record oral histories. She moves to Shreveport, Louisiana, for her first assignment, shortly after reluctantly accepting a marriage proposal from Irving, a young businessman who could save her family from poverty. One Shreveport resident quickly seizes her interest: 94-year-old Bridget Fenerty. The book then alternates between Miriam’s diary entries and transcripts of her interview with the elderly woman. Like many Irish families fleeing famine, Bridget’s immigrated to New Orleans in the mid-1800s. Her father didn’t survive the voyage, and later, after her mother’s death, she was forced to take a full-time maid position at the age of 11. Bridget then kept house for families before, during, and after the Civil War. She lost loved ones to that conflict, as well as to accidents, illness, and addiction. In one heartbreaking sequence, her fleeing Confederate employers kidnap her young son and take him to Brazil. She befriends Solomon Rusk, a freed slave who helps in her pursuit of her child. As Miriam listens to Bridget’s story, she reckons with her own impending marriage as well as her growing attraction to Ellie, a local artist. Lawler’s historical research yields vivid, lived-in settings and characters, and he viscerally transmits what it really meant to be a young Irish maid in antebellum New Orleans. He also shows how Bridget’s life was punctuated by instances of grace and connection, as well as by moments of tragedy. Some chapters suffer from overwriting, however; Miriam’s diary entries seem true to life, effectively depicting the thoughts of a learning young writer, but they move the plot along very slowly, due to an abundance of description and introspection. Bridget’s interview is far more engaging and vivid as it depicts a tragedy-marred life led with persistent energy and optimism, although the story’s tension slacks during the book’s final third.
An overlong but often enjoyable historical tale about surviving hardship.Pub Date: May 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5306-0781-5
Page Count: 444
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2018
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
© Copyright 2025 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.
