by Cornelia Alley ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 5, 2017
A vivid, absorbing tale of Europe painfully shaking off the shackles of the past.
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America becomes the endpoint of a European family’s transgenerational journey through upheaval, religious persecution, and endless domestic labor in this debut historical novel.
The story begins with a lugubrious bang when Pierre de la Vigne, a woodcarver in Valenciennes, part of the Spanish Netherlands in 1535, returns home from a business trip with bubonic plague and dies in his father Nicolas’ arms. Ever practical, Nicolas quarantines himself in the workshop and spends his last days bludgeoning the hundreds of rats swarming around him. That opening introduces prominent themes in Alley’s epic: the constant threat of sudden death; the verminous filth of a time before modern sanitation; and the importance of the close-knit patriarchal family, which accomplished many things now done by corporations, schools, and churches. The resilient de la Vigne clan is thus the collective main character as it moves on with second son, Emile, as head of the business and a household including his stepmother, Maria, widowed sister-in-law Louise, and younger siblings. They prosper over the decades, but the Reformation fuels conflict within the family—Emile and Louise marry and convert to Calvinism while Maria clings to Roman Catholicism, provoking tense theological discussions—and between the Catholic Church, a snake pit of corruption in the novel’s telling, and the city’s burgeoning Protestant population. When a Catholic governor orders the conquest of Valenciennes in 1566, Emile is arrested and the family faces exile. Jumping ahead to the early 17th century, the narrative refocuses on Emile’s grandson Guillaume; with Valenciennes prostrate under the Jesuit boot, he heads to Protestant Amsterdam to seek his fortune and finds it when he and his wife cross the Atlantic to start a fur-trading post in frontier Mannahatta. Along the way, there are plenty of household chores, which form the sprawling tale’s central action. Whole chapters are consumed in preparing meals, securing coal and wood for the fire, teaching kids their Latin and math, and sewing clothes and darning underwear. These scenes are well-researched and meticulously detailed, and they amount to a kind of Annales school of historical fiction that conveys an engrossing sense of life in its fullness in a distant time and culture. The resulting gusher of period lore, illuminating everything from the protocol of ferry travel to the procedural of printing presses, is spiced with a little bawdiness (the era’s typical four-to-a-bed sleeping arrangements make every tryst common knowledge) and some exciting adventures, including a transvestite prison break. With so much time, history, and theology to cover, Alley’s dialogue often bogs down in exposition—“The earliest beginnings of this nasty situation were easily traced back to the Hapsburg rule, Alva, Marguerite of Spain and the Spanish Inquisition”—but she also pens poetic passages: “Into the muted bird song and surrounding silence, the sound of one miniature bell, otherworldly and distant, began to call the hour of Vespers.” Mostly she writes workmanlike prose about ordinary people doing ordinary but vital things, deftly portraying both the richness and organic solidarity of life in the Old World and the precariousness and chafing restrictions that drove people to the New.
A vivid, absorbing tale of Europe painfully shaking off the shackles of the past.Pub Date: June 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5391-6255-1
Page Count: 708
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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by Colson Whitehead ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 16, 2019
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
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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
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