Clark has talent and energy to burn. But she’s burning both up in wasteful displays of gratuitous pyrotechnics.
A seduced and abandoned maiden’s tribulations in early 18th-century London are recounted with almost frightening gusto in the British author’s successor to her debut historical novel, The Great Stink (2005).
When teenaged Eliza Tally is rejected by the well-born lover who impregnated her, then “married” her only nominally, Eliza’s pragmatic mother sends her away to become maid to London apothecary Grayson Black, whose truculent wife manages the household and savagely mistreats Eliza and her “half-witted” companion servant Mary. Eliza’s pregnancy is also endangered by the unwelcome attentions of Black’s oafish apprentice Edgar Pettigrew—and by her increasing suspicions that scientific researches undertaken by the secretive Black are disturbingly related to his interest in her services. The narrative of Eliza’s experiences and discoveries is juxtaposed with Black’s research notes and correspondence, from which we learn that he is studying “effects of strong emotions, fear, desire, and such like, upon the physical form of a foetus”; furthermore, using pregnant females as laboratory animals, to learn what “monsters” they may produce. The roots of Black’s obsession lie in the circumstances of his own birth: a story Clark (unwisely) declines to tell. Instead, she concocts a raving melodrama (precisely and impressively researched, but almost insanely lurid). It’s a compound of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, in which too many characters are drooling or malformed grotesques and virtually every scene is a festering sewer (the spectacle of St. Paul’s Cathedral being a hopeful exception), with numerous incidents plunging into stomach-churning visceral and excretory detail. Eliza perseveres, thanks to an initially benign bookseller, thwarted by the malevolent Ms. Black, ennobled by her protective affection for the pathetic Mary (whose own history holds secrets eventually disclosed). And all falls apart, in a climax so absurd it would seem excessive in the lamest of bodice-rippers.
Clark has talent and energy to burn. But she’s burning both up in wasteful displays of gratuitous pyrotechnics.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-101206-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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