A sensitive and vivid coming-of-age account in a compelling setting.
In Sanders’ debut historical novel, a newly motherless boy accompanies his father to Africa on a religious mission.
Eleven-year-old Mark Morgan’s mother died recently, and now he and his dad, Reece, are starting over in western Kenya at a Quaker mission devoted to teacher training. It’s 1966, and Kenya has been an independent nation for only a couple of years; people’s memories of bloody warfare and prison camps are still fresh. Mark gets an inkling of this struggle when he sees what he thinks is a one-armed man slitting someone’s throat. It turns out to be a barber shaving a customer, but the image haunts Mark; that barber, Mr. Okwiri, lost his arm as a child when a paramilitary general cut it off. Other people in the village are marked by similar cruelties, including Layla, an otherworldly girl whose strangeness is related to “bad things” that she experienced in a detention camp. Still, Kenya works its way into Mark’s heart, and he gains new maturity as he makes friends, develops romantic feelings for Layla, and explores the rainforest. Although he experiences danger and witnesses tragedy, by the end of the story—as his best buddy, Raymond “Radio” Mathenge, tells him—Africa has become Mark’s “mother.” Overall, Sanders presents an engagingly written story with a dramatic historical underpinning. Mark is an appealing character who’s thoughtful, open to new experiences, and courageous. Relatively few readers will be familiar with Quaker evangelicalism and its African expression, which gives the novel freshness. The book highlights details of the country’s history and culture in natural ways without ever feeling overly expository, and Sanders handles gruesome events with a sense of dignity for the victims. Mark, who’s white, is the main character, but Kenyan voices are well represented and diverse. Readers should be aware, however, that although the book’s young narrator and the coming-of-age theme might indicate a middle-grade or YA audience, the novel does include a sex scene between underage characters. Also, the book sometimes misrepresents Kenyan folklore, as when it invokes the Native American concept of the “spirit animal.”
A sensitive and vivid coming-of-age account in a compelling setting.Pub Date: April 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9995501-2-0
Page Count: 290
Publisher: New Door Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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