This family-inspired history tells a compelling story while straddling genres.
In Mason’s historical novel, a young enslaved man escapes to join the Union army during the Civil War.
In this impassioned and historically grounded book, the author draws on both research and family oral tradition to recount the experiences of his ancestor, Parson Sykes. After researching and planning their escape, in 1864 Parson and his two brothers leave the Virginia plantation where they have spent their lives, elude pursuers and slave-catchers, and make their way to a Union army camp, where they enlist in one of the recently formed Black regiments and join in the fighting until the war’s conclusion. Parson’s decision to liberate himself and his brothers is born of an awareness that being enslaved is an abhorrent condition and a fortuitous set of circumstances (he is literate, and a part-time job at the local railroad station gives him access to outside news and information about the wider world) that allow him to move from intention to action. The book establishes the historical context for Parson’s experience of enslavement shortly before the Civil War by connecting it to local history, as he and his family lived in the region of Virginia where, a generation earlier, Nat Turner had led an uprising that terrified white enslavers and solidified their commitment to maintaining the practice of slavery. The author also provides a detailed explanation of how the United States Colored Troops were established and how they fit into the military and racial hierarchy of the North. The book, the first in a planned trilogy about Parson, offers an insightful and informative look at a crucial piece of history through the experience of a single person. Mason presents the book as a novel, but readers are likely to experience the book more as a biographical or historical work than as a piece of fiction. The narrative centers documentary evidence and historical context as much as plot, and there is no dialogue. The characters’ actions are generally described rather than dramatized (“Parson and his brothers devised passive resistance by damaging equipment, working slowly, and keeping their human rights and religious beliefs alive”). While the book is effective as a history, as a novel it has its shortcomings.
This family-inspired history tells a compelling story while straddling genres.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2022
ISBN: 9780999133118
Page Count: 233
Publisher: PublishDrive
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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