Evans frankly and unflinchingly depicts a romance overwhelmed by the ennui of everyday life.
A portrait of a relationship on the brink set in Great Recession–era London.
British author Evans (26a, 2005), winner of the Orange Award for New Writers, has centered her new novel on a love in crisis. Black Londoners Melissa and Michael are on “the far side of youth, at a moment in their lives when the gradual descent into age was beginning to appear,” and outwardly they seem to be a properly suited pair. Melissa’s best friend, Hazel, even refers to them as “Chocolate”—playing off their initials, M&M—and what could be more perfect than that? Nonetheless, as can be expected in a novel dedicated to the underside of a long-term relationship, all is not well at 13 Paradise Row, the home Melissa and Michael share with their two children. Balancing dry humor, wit, and empathy, Evans expertly delineates her main characters' frustrations: The expectations of both motherhood and romantic partnership leave Melissa on the precipice of exploding in anger or having a breakdown, while Michael laments, mostly while drinking red wine, that his desire for Melissa is unrequited, a view steeped in nostalgia for the honeymoon phase of their relationship and explained through the music of John Legend, whose second single gives the book its title. Most of the time Evans' writing is accurate as she moves from the small details of domestic life to larger ideas—feminism, urban life, black identity. Here she is describing the doldrums of monogamy: “Passion, at its truest and most fierce, does not liaise with toothpaste. It does not wait around for toning and exfoliation. It wants spontaneity. It wants recklessness. Passion is dirty, and they were too clean.” At other moments, Evans’ narrative choices seem perplexing, such as her use of the slang phrase “off the hizzle” as a refrain; it seems dated and less cool on the page than when emanating from the mouth of Snoop Dogg circa 2005. In fact, the biggest weakness of an otherwise astute novel is Evans' occasional overreliance on pop culture. For instance, the story is bookended by the first election of Barack Obama and the death of Michael Jackson, two culturally significant moments that are, at best, tangential to the story.
Evans frankly and unflinchingly depicts a romance overwhelmed by the ennui of everyday life.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63149-481-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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