A touching coming-of-age tale, deepened rather than cheapened by the heroine’s connection to the King.
Imaginary correspondence between Elvis Presley and an Atlanta schoolgirl forms the unlikely basis for a sweet and gripping first novel.
Granted, the set-up is contrived. Fourteen-year-old Achsa McEachern writes a fan letter to Presley in 1955 after hearing “That’s All Right, Mama”; he thinks she’s a man because of her name and her sophisticated way with words; when she corrects him, he tells her to keep writing anyway, and he asks if she will help him with his grammar. As the fiercely ambitious Elvis puts it in a letter: “It is just I don’t want NOTHING not NOTHING AT ALL to hold me back.” Presley’s letters credibly reproduce the personality we know from countless biographies: intelligent but uneducated, ambitious but insecure, genuinely religious and wildly sexy. It’s Thomas’s fictional creation, Achsa, however, who really commands our attention. Born with a harelip, persecuted by her redneck classmates because of her plainness and her brains, she’s further troubled by her parents’ fraught marriage. Her creepily devout father is pathologically jealous of her beautiful mother, who clearly has secrets to keep. Achsa’s unhappiness and loneliness spill out in her letters. Elvis responds warmly and thoughtfully; on the brink of stardom, he too needs someone to confide in as his world changes with blinding speed. The two correspond over the next 14 months. The developments in Achsa’s life—a sudden death that could be suicide, revelation of a long-hidden relationship—might be melodramatic if they weren’t chronicled with such painful fidelity to the agonized self-consciousness of a smart, sensitive teenager who longs to fit in but also knows that she’s destined for better things than high-school popularity. The ending is sad but triumphant for Achsa; added poignancy comes from readers’ knowledge that Elvis’s hopes and dreams will be both fulfilled and horribly betrayed.
A touching coming-of-age tale, deepened rather than cheapened by the heroine’s connection to the King.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59264-122-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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