To the reader’s amusement, Henry discovers more about himself, the Bible and the ways of the world than he’d ever...
The Lord works in humorously mysterious ways in this Southern picaresque teaming a jaded car thief and a young, impressionable Bible salesman.
The wry, latest from Edgerton (Lunch at the Piccadilly, 2003, etc.), set in his native North Carolina, concerns the unlikely bond between a pair of disparate characters. Preston Clearwater, who looks vaguely like Clark Gable, is a slick criminal who has graduated from stealing 1,600 pairs of aviator sunglasses during World War II to participating in a car-theft ring run by a war buddy. Clearwater’s work requires an accomplice to drive the cars he steals. Providence provides him with a partner when he picks up a hitchhiker named Henry Dampier, a 20-year-old Bible salesman who is very gullible and naive though not necessarily stupid. Henry has a scam of his own, sending away for free Bibles from missionary organizations and then selling them door to door. Raised by a pious aunt and a more fun-loving uncle after the freak accident that killed his father, Henry is trying to find his way in the world, looking to the Bible as a moral compass, though confused by the mixed messages it sends. Preston convinces Henry that the car thief is really an undercover FBI agent infiltrating a car-theft ring, and he offers Henry more money than he makes selling Bibles, while allowing him to sell Bibles on the side. Chapters alternate between ones titled “Exodus” (Preston and Henry on the road in the early 1950s) and “Genesis” (Henry’s early years of the 1930s), in that order, before culminating in “Revelation.” Along the way, there is a little sex (which complicates relationships) and a little violence (which leads to discovery). Yet plot is secondary to character, with most of the humor deriving from the contrasts between the partners whom fate has brought together.
To the reader’s amusement, Henry discovers more about himself, the Bible and the ways of the world than he’d ever anticipated.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-316-11751-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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