A sprawling, often engaging story of a family in bondage set against the backdrop of the Civil War.
In this debut historical novel, Calloway fictionalizes the story of his enslaved Black great-grandfather.
George Calloway was born into slavery in 1829 in Cleveland, Tennessee. From the age of 12, he was expected to work as hard as a grown man, and he did. Indeed, he worked so hard that when the White overseer died, George was made the manager of the farm at the age of 18: “He was proud of the fact that the farm produced more per acre with him as boss than under old Bryant. He was proud of the straight rows, taut fences….George could run a farm as well as any man.” Now, on the eve of the Civil War, George is married with a child, and they live in a small cabin on the land that his enslaver owns. Marsa Thom, as George calls him, is the biological father of George and his siblings, although this relationship isn’t acknowledged openly. Still, the horrors of slavery affect George’s family deeply: His freedman father-in-law, after a run-in with a White man, is whipped within an inch of his life, and his enslaved younger brother Henry is sent off to work at a plantation in New Orleans in exchange for cash. George and his family do what they can to support people who decide to run for freedom, including his younger brother Louis, a frequent (and frequently recaptured) escapee. Change may be coming soon, however, with the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency and a rumored potential invasion of the South by abolitionists. George isn’t sure what war might bring—an end to slavery is almost too outlandish for him to imagine—but one thing’s for sure: Tennessee is about to get a lot more violent.
Calloway’s elegant prose effectively captures the tension and textures of the period, as when George comes upon some neighbors celebrating the surrender of Fort Sumter: “George walked out into the front office and stopped short when he saw the jug of moonshine spilling on the out-of-town newspapers that had just come in that morning. Acock was so drunk that his hand listed badly to one side spilling the clear liquid, smearing the message of Confederate Sovereignty printed on the front pages.” Although the author presents the novel as something of a family history project, he shows himself to be such a talented writer of historical fiction that the biographical element of the work barely registers. George and his family are complexly rendered characters, and it’s only the occasional photographs and footnotes that remind the reader of the underlying reality of the story. This relationship to true history complicates some of the less-realistic aspects of the plot, such as the oddly honorable depiction of enslaver Marsa Thom, whose sympathetic rendering will likely be off-putting to some readers. It’s a lengthy novel at more than 400 pages, but Calloway largely earns the length with his nuanced depictions of life in Bradley County.
A sprawling, often engaging story of a family in bondage set against the backdrop of the Civil War.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8-9865014-0-6
Page Count: 419
Publisher: Point Fermin Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
