A thoughtful but cool second novel. The melody doesn’t linger on.
As a famous political folk singer fades into old age, scattered members of his circle contemplate their own incomplete relationships with this elusive man.
There’s a dark star at the center of British television producer Elton’s (Mr. Toppit, 2010) second novel: Isaac "Iz" Herzl, the celebrated activist singer whose recordings, appearances, campaigns, archives, and interactions with other famous protesters have rendered him a living legend. But Iz, now 80, is kind of a black hole, a remote figure whose three children scarcely know him. Narrated from the points of view of four characters orbiting the near-silent celebrity, this is the story of how Iz Herzl came to be and the ripple effects of his life on those connected to him. His daughter, Rose, ponders her father’s detachment while caring for her younger brother, Huddie, who's dying of a form of muscular dystrophy. Joseph Carter, Iz’s oldest child, grew up estranged from his famous father but has constructed his own, more mainstream showbiz career, a spotty tale of success mixed with dubious emotional connections. Shirley, Joseph’s longtime friend and the wife of his musical partner, contributes her own unhappy experience to the mix. And then there’s Maurice Gifford, a schoolboy at odds with almost everyone around him until he finally makes an important friendship. Elton pieces together these often humdrum characters in a teasingly tepid fashion. Rose’s intelligence and her close attachment to Huddie are the strongest aspects of a patchwork quilt of a story, set in the U.K. and dominated by the vacuum of Iz. The novel’s formula is a blend of light, rather English humor, tragedy, and individual experiences of struggle, which, even when exposed and combined, don’t amount to quite enough substance.
A thoughtful but cool second novel. The melody doesn’t linger on.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59051-799-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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